Everything works perfectly in Bartlett Sher’s brilliant new production of My Fair Lady. The sets (by Michael Yeargan) are wonderful; the costumes (Catherine Zuber) are splendid; and the cast, led by Lauren Ambrose as Eliza and Harry Hadden-Paton as Higgins, is first rate. But above all, the musical, so often seen before, feels entirely fresh.

Sher’s My Fair Lady is actually more faithful to George Bernard Shaw’s original concept of his play, Pygmalion, upon which the musical is based, than any production before, including the famous movie with Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. At the very end of the show, Eliza Doolittle, the cockney flower-seller instructed in how to be an upper-class lady by Henry Higgins, the gentleman scholar, proudly walks away from her self-centered control freak of a teacher. Even as Higgins persists in asking her for his slippers, she “sweeps out,” as Shaw had directed, to claim her independence.

Ambrose’s spirited Eliza might seem like an anachronism, tailored to an audience suffused with #MeToo sentiments. And Hadden-Paton’s Higgins might be seen as a typical “mansplainer” who just doesn’t get how times have changed. But Ambrose comes much closer to Shaw’s Eliza than Hepburn, or any of her predecessors in the role.

Shaw’s ideal of female emancipation was, in fact, sabotaged from the very beginning. In the first London production in 1914, to the disgust of the author, Herbert Beerbohm Tree playing Higgins gives Eliza (Mrs. Stella Patrick Campbell) a loving look, intimating a happy life together. When the movie of Pygmalion, starring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller, was made in 1938, the Hollywood producers insisted on a romantic ending, too. And a similar dose of sugar was sprinkled on the conclusion of the Harrison-Hepburn film.

Like the musical, Shaw’s play, too, was based on an older story, the Greek myth about Galatea, the milk-white beauty sculpted by Pygmalion of Cyprus. After carving his perfect woman out of ivory, he falls in love with her. Answering his prayers, Aphrodite gives her life, and the artist and his feminine ideal live as man and wife. This is a story that could signify many things, but one of the themes is artistic obsession, about a man who only has eyes for his own creation.

Shaw’s main interest, on the other hand, was in class and the role of language in defining social rank in Britain. The art of Henry Higgins, as obsessed as the Greek Pygmalion, is to place people by their accents with absolute precision. He can tell by any given English accent not only in which town someone is born, but exactly where in that town. And naturally, he can detect every shade of social class. When he hears Eliza for the first time, selling flowers in Covent Garden, he can even tell which street she grew up in. His loyal companion, Colonel Pickering, played in the current production by Allan Corduner, is immediately pinned down to his school, university, and last place of residence: Harrow, Cambridge, and India.

This is something of a joke, of course, but only up to a point. Until quite recently, and perhaps to some extent still, British people were cursed or privileged by their class. The right or wrong accent, like the right shoes or the wrong tie, could determine a person’s life. Language shaped one’s identity.

That Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, two of the greatest theatrical satirists of British class, were both Irish is surely no coincidence. They had the acid eyes of born outsiders. Wilde was a libertarian dandy, who ridiculed British conventions. Shaw was a fierce critic of class snobbery, and a defender of women’s rights at a time when women didn’t even have the right to vote.

Higgins, too, in all his incarnations, including Hadden-Paton’s, is a nonconformist of a kind, and rather like Pygmalion, an artist in love with his own creations. His sculpture, as it were, of the ideal woman is thus Eliza. But he also talks a great deal about the human soul, even as he refuses to recognize one in Eliza.

One of the most moving scenes, in the movies, as well as in the current production, is the private celebration after the ball, where Eliza manages to pass for the first time as a grand lady. Higgins is toasted by all his servants: “Congratulations, Professor Higgins, for your glorious victory.” And Pickering sings:

You did it! You did it! You did it!
They thought she was ecstatic
And so damned Aristocratic,
And they never knew that you did it!

All the while, Eliza sits in a corner, utterly ignored, as though she had played no active part in her transformation from a flower girl to a lady, as though she were nothing but Higgins’s artifact. This is also the moment of her rebellion. She throws a fit and pelts Higgins with his precious slippers.

The question is what happens to the human soul when social identity changes. Eliza speaks a new language and has a new set of manners, to match her new jewels and clothes. That Cecil Beaton, who designed the clothes and the sets for the movie of My Fair Lady, will forever be associated with the musical is entirely justified, for the look tells the story. The ladies are so tightly cocooned in their extravagant and fanciful gowns that they appear to be imprisoned in them; evening dress as a kind of bondage.

But who is Eliza now? Where is her soul? Like Pygmalion, though with much less ardor, Higgins falls in love with her, as he thinks: “I’ve grown accustomed to her face.” But it is not her soul that he loves, but only the well-spoken, beautifully dressed, fine-mannered figure that he shaped.

To end the play, or film, or musical, with the artist and his creation falling into romantic bliss is indeed a betrayal of Shaw’s intentions. For to be free, in the way Shaw wanted women to be free, Eliza has to break with Higgins. And Higgins is too much of an artist to be content with being tied down in a conventional marriage anyway. His famous song, “I’m an Ordinary Man,” in which he advises, “Let a woman in your life, and you invite eternal strife,” may sound like the expression of a typical male chauvinist. And in a way, that is just what it is. But it is also the sentiment of a man who can only live for his work.

And so, they must part ways. Shaw actually wrote an alternative ending for the movie with Leslie Howard. In that version, which the producers rejected, Eliza marries the penniless upper-class twit Freddy Eynsford-Hill, and runs her own flower shop. This, too, seems unsatisfactory. It is much better to turn around and walk away, as Lauren Ambrose does with such panache.

My Fair Lady, directed by Bartlett Sher (book by Alan Jay Lerner; music by Frederick Loewe), is at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, New York, through January 2019.

The post Doolittle Done Well appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Nobuyoshi Araki and Nan Goldin are good friends. This is not surprising, since the seventy-seven-year-old Japanese photographer and the younger American are engaged in something similar: they make an art out of chronicling their lives in photographs, aiming at a raw kind of authenticity, which often involves sexual practices outside the conventional bounds of respectability. Araki spent a lot of time with the prostitutes, masseuses, and “adult” models of the Tokyo demi-monde, while Goldin made her name with pictures of her gay and trans friends in downtown Manhattan.

Of the two, Goldin exposes herself more boldly (one of her most famous images is of her own battered face after a beating by her lover). Araki did take some very personal photographs, currently displayed in an exhibition at New York City’s Museum of Sex, of his wife Yoko during their honeymoon in 1971, including pictures of them having sex, and of her death from cancer less than twenty years later. But this work is exceptional—perhaps the most moving he ever made—and the kind of self-exposure seen in Goldin’s harrowing self-portrait is largely absent from Araki’s art.

Araki is not, however, shy about his sexual predilections, recorded in thousands of pictures of naked women tied up in ropes, or spreading their legs, or writhing on hotel beds. A number of photographs, also in the current exhibition, of a long-term lover named Kaori show her in various nude poses, over which Araki has splashed paint meant to evoke jets of sperm. Araki proudly talks about having sex with most of his models. He likes breaking down the border between himself and his subjects, and sometimes will hand the camera to one of his models and become a subject himself. But whenever he appears in a photograph, he is posing, mugging, or (in one typical example in the show) holding a beer bottle between his thighs, while pretending to have an orgasm.

If this is authenticity, it is a stylized, theatrical form of authenticity. His mode is not confessional in the way Goldin’s is. Araki is not interested in showing his most intimate feelings. He is a showman as much as a photographer. His round face, fluffy hair, odd spectacles, T-shirts, and colored suspenders, instantly recognizable in Japan, are now part of his brand, which he promotes in published diaries and endless interviews. Since Araki claims to do little else but take pictures, from the moment he gets up in the morning till he falls asleep at night, the pictures are records of his life. But that life looks as staged as many of his photographs.

Although Araki has published hundreds of books, he is not a versatile photographer. He really has only two main subjects: Tokyo, his native city, and sex. Some of his Tokyo pictures are beautiful, even poetic. A few are on display in the Museum of Sex: a moody black-and-white view of the urban landscape at twilight, a few street scenes revealing his nostalgia for the city of his childhood, which has almost entirely disappeared.

But it is his other obsession that is mainly on show in New York. It might seem a bit of a comedown for a world-famous photographer to have an exhibition at a museum that caters mostly to the prurient end of the tourist trade, especially after having had major shows at the Musée Guimet in Paris and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. But Araki is the least snobbish of artists. The distinctions between high and low culture, or art and commerce, do not much interest him. In Japan, he has published pictures in some quite raunchy magazines.

The only tacky aspect of an otherwise well-curated, sophisticated exhibition is the entrance: a dark corridor decorated with a kind of spider web of ropes that would be more appropriate in a seedy sex club. I could have done without the piped-in music, too.

Sex is, of course, an endlessly fascinating subject. Araki’s obsessive quest for the mysteries of erotic desire, not only expressed in his photographs of nudes, but also in lubricious close-ups of flowers and fruits, could be seen as a lust for life and defiance of death. Some of these pictures are beautifully composed and printed, and some are rough and scattershot. One wall is covered in Polaroid photos, rather like Andy Warhol’s pictures of his friends and models, except that Araki’s show a compulsive interest in female anatomy.

Genitalia, as the source of life, are literally objects of worship in many Japanese Shinto shrines. But there is something melancholy about a number of Araki’s nudes; something frozen, almost corpse-like about the women trussed up in ropes staring at the camera with expressionless faces. The waxen face of his wife Yoko in her casket comes to mind. Then there are those odd plastic models of lizards and dinosaurs that Araki likes to place on the naked bodies of women in his pictures, adding another touch of morbidity.

But to criticize Araki’s photos—naked women pissing into umbrellas at a live sex show, women with flowers stuck into their vaginas, women in schoolgirl uniforms suspended in bondage, and so on—for being pornographic, vulgar, or obscene, is rather to miss the point. When the filmmaker Nagisa Oshima was prosecuted in the 1970s for obscenity after stills from his erotic masterpiece, In the Realm of the Senses, were published, his defense was: “So, what’s wrong with obscenity?”

The point of Oshima’s movie, and of Araki’s pictures, is a refusal to be constrained by rules of social respectability or good taste when it comes to sexual passion. Oshima’s aim was to see whether he could make an art film out of hardcore porn. Araki doesn’t make such high-flown claims for his work. To him, the photos are an extension of his life. Since much of life is about seeking erotic satisfaction, his pictures reflect that.

Displayed alongside Araki’s photographs at the Museum of Sex are a few examples of Shunga, the erotic woodcuts popular in Edo Period Japan (1603–1868), pictures of courtesans and their clients having sex in various ways, usually displaying huge penises penetrating capacious vulvas. These, too, have something to do with the fertility cults of Shinto, but they were also an expression of artistic rebellion. Political protest against the highly authoritarian Shoguns was far too dangerous. The alternative was to challenge social taboos. Occasionally, government officials would demonstrate their authority by cracking down on erotica. They still do. Araki has been prosecuted for obscenity at least once.

One response to Araki’s work, especially in the West, and especially in our time, is to accuse him of “objectifying” women. In the strict sense that women, often in a state of undress, striking sexual poses, are the focus of his, and our, gaze, this is true. (Lest one assume that the gaze is always male, I was interested to note that most of the viewers at the Museum of Sex during my visit were young women.) But Araki maintains that his photographs are a collaborative project. As in any consensual sado-masochistic game, this requires a great deal of trust.

Some years ago, I saw an Araki show in Tokyo. Susan Sontag, who was also there, expressed her shock that young women would agree to being “degraded” in Araki’s pictures. Whereupon the photographer Annie Leibovitz, who was there too, said that women were probably lining up to be photographed by him. Interviews with Araki’s models, some of which are on view at the Museum of Sex, suggest that this is true. Several women talk about feeling liberated, even loved, by the experience of sitting for Araki. One spoke of his intensity as a divine gift. It is certainly true that when Araki advertised for ordinary housewives to be photographed in his usual fashion, there was no shortage of volunteers. Several books came from these sessions. 

But not all his muses have turned out to be so contented, at least in retrospect.

Earlier this year, Kaori wrote in a blog post that she felt exploited by him over the years (separately, in 2017 a model accused Araki of inappropriate contact during a shoot that took place in 1990). Araki exhibited Kaori’s photos without telling her or giving her any credit. On one occasion, she was told to pose naked while he photographed her in front of foreign visitors. When she complained at the time, he told her, probably accurately, that the visitors had not come to see her, but to see him taking pictures. (The Museum of Sex has announced that Kaori’s statement will be incorporated into the exhibition’s wall text.)

These stories ring true. It is the way things frequently are in Japan, not only in relations between artists and models. Contracts are often shunned. Borderlines between personal favors and professional work are blurred. It is entirely possible that Araki behaved badly toward Kaori, and maybe to others, too. Artists often use their muses to excite their imaginations, and treat them shabbily once the erotic rush wears off.

One might wish that Araki had not been the self-absorbed obsessive he probably is. Very often in art and literature, it is best to separate the private person from the work. Even egotistical bastards, after all, can show tenderness in their art. But in Araki’s case, the distinction is harder to maintain—this is an artist who insists on his life being inseparable from his pictures. The life has dark sides, and his lechery might in contemporary terms be deemed inappropriate, but that is precisely what makes his art so interesting. Araki’s erotomania is what drives him: aside from the posing and self-promotion, it is the one thing that can be called absolutely authentic.

“The Incomplete Araki: Sex, Life, and Death in the Works of Nobuyoshi Araki” is at the Museum of Sex, New York, through August 31.

The post Araki, Erotomaniac appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

V.S. Naipaul’s fastidiousness was legendary. I met him for the first time in Berlin, in 1991, when he was feted for the German edition of his latest book. A smiling young waitress offered him some decent white wine. Naipaul took the bottle from her hand, examined the label for some time, like a fine-art dealer inspecting a dubious piece, handed the bottle back, and said with considerable disdain: “I think perhaps later, perhaps later.” (Naipaul often repeated phrases.)

This kind of thing also found its way into his travel writing. He could work himself up into a rage about the quality of the towels in his hotel bathroom, or the slack service on an airline, or the poor food at a restaurant, as though these were personal affronts to him, the impeccably turned-out traveler.

Naipaul was nothing if not self-aware. In his first travel account of India, An Area of Darkness (1964), he describes a visit to his ancestral village in a poor, dusty part of Uttar Pradesh, where an old woman clutches Naipaul’s shiny English shoes. Naipaul feels overwhelmed, alienated, presumed upon. He wants to leave this remote place his grandfather left behind many years before. A young man wishes to hitch a ride to the nearest town. Naipaul says: “No, let the idler walk.” And so, he adds, “the visit ended, in futility and impatience, a gratuitous act of cruelty, self-reproach and flight.”

It is tempting to see Naipaul as a blimpish figure, aping the manners of British bigots; or as a fussy Brahmin, unwilling to eat from the same plates as lower castes. Both views miss the mark. Naipaul’s fastidiousness had more to do with what he called the “raw nerves” of a displaced colonial, a man born in a provincial outpost of empire, who had struggled against the indignities of racial prejudice to make his mark, to be a writer, to add his voice to what he saw as a universal civilization. Dirty towels, bad service, and the wretchedness of his ancestral land were insults to his sense of dignity, of having overcome so much.

These raw nerves did not make him into an apologist for empire, let alone for the horrors inflicted by white Europeans. On the contrary, he blamed the abject state of so many former colonies on imperial conquest. In The Loss of Eldorado (1969), a short history of his native Trinidad, he describes in great detail how waves of bloody conquest wiped out entire peoples and their cultures, leaving half-baked, dispossessed, rootless societies. Such societies have lost what Naipaul calls their “wholeness” and are prone to revolutionary fantasies and religious fanaticism.

Wholeness was an important idea to Naipaul. To him, it represented cultural memory, a settled sense of place and identity. History was important to him, as well as literary achievement upon which new generations of writers could build. It irked him that there was nothing for him to build on in Trinidad, apart from some vaguely recalled Brahmin rituals and books about a faraway European country where it rained all the time, a place he could only imagine. England, to him, represented a culture that was whole. And, from the distance of his childhood, so did India. (In fact, he knew more about ancient Rome, taught by a Latin teacher in Trinidad, than he did about either country.)

When he finally managed to go to India, he was disappointed. India was a “wounded civilization,” maimed by Muslim conquests and European colonialism. He realized he didn’t belong there, any more than in Trinidad or in England. And so he sought to find his place in the world through words. Books would be his escape from feeling rootless and superfluous. His father, Seepersad Naipaul, had tried to lift himself from his surroundings by writing journalism and short stories, which he hoped, in vain, to publish in England. Writing, to father and son, was more than a profession; it was a calling that conferred a kind of nobility.

Naipaul’s most famous novel, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), drew on the father’s story of frustrated ambition. By going back into the world of his childhood, he found the words to create his own link to that universal literary civilization. He often told interviewers that he only existed in his books.

If raw nerves made him irascible at times, they also sharpened his vision. He understood people who were culturally dislocated and who tried to find solace in religious or political fantasies that were often borrowed from other places and ineptly mimicked. He described such delusions precisely and often comically. His sense of humor sometimes bordered on cruelty, and in interviews with liberal journalists it could take the form of calculated provocation. But his refusal to sentimentalize the wounds in postcolonial societies produced some of his most penetrating insights.

My favorite book by Naipaul is not A House for Mr. Biswas, or the later novel A Bend in the River (1979), his various books on India, or even his 1987 masterpiece The Enigma of Arrival, but a slender volume entitled Finding the Center (1984). It consists of two long essays, one about how he learned to become a writer, how he found his own voice, and the other about a trip to Ivory Coast in 1982. In the first piece, written out of unflinching self-knowledge, he gives a lucid account of the way he sees the world, and how he puts this in words. He travels to understand himself, as well as the politics and histories of the countries he visits. Following random encounters with people who interest him, he tries to understand how people see themselves in relation to the world they live in. But by doing so, he finds his own place, too, in his own inimitable words.

The second part of Finding the Center, called “The Crocodiles of Yamassoukro,” is a perfect example of his methods. It is a surprisingly sympathetic account of a messed-up African country, filled with foreigners as well as local people wrapped up in a variety of self-told stories, some of them fantastical, about how they see themselves fitting in. African Americans come in search of an imaginary Africa. A black woman from Martinique escapes in a private world of quasi-French snobbery. And the Africans themselves, in Naipaul’s vision, have held onto a “whole” culture under a thin layer of false mimicry. This culture of ancestral spirits comes alive at night, when the gimcrack modernity of daily urban life is forgotten.

Being in Africa reminds him of his childhood in Trinidad, when descendants of slaves turned the world upside down in carnivals, in which the oppressive white world ceased to exist and they reigned as African kings and queens. It is an oddly romantic vision of African life, this idea that something whole lurks under the surface of a half-made, borrowed civilization. Perhaps it is more telling of Naipaul’s own longings than of the reality of most people’s lives. If he is always clear-eyed about the pretentions of religious fanatics, Third World mimic men, and delusional political figures, his idea of wholeness can sound almost sentimental.

I remember being in a car with Naipaul one summer day in Wiltshire, England, near the cottage where he lived. He told me about his driver, a local man. The driver, he said, had a special bond with the rolling hills we were passing through. The man was aware of his ancestors buried under our feet. He belonged here. He felt the link with generations that had been here before him: “That is how he thinks, that is how he thinks.”

I am not convinced at all that this was the way Naipaul’s driver thought. But it was certainly the way he thought in the writer’s imagination. Naipaul was our greatest poet of the half-baked and the displaced. It was the imaginary wholeness of civilizations that sometimes led him astray. He became too sympathetic to the Hindu nationalism that is now poisoning India politics, as if a whole Hindu civilization were on the rise after centuries of alien Muslim or Western despoliations.

There is no such thing as a whole civilization. But some of Naipaul’s greatest literature came out of his yearning for it. Although he may, at times, have associated this with England or India, his imaginary civilization was not tied to any nation. It was a literary idea, secular, enlightened, passed on through writing. That is where he made his home, and that is where, in his books, he will live on.

The post V.S. Naipaul, Poet of the Displaced appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

V.S. Naipaul’s fastidiousness was legendary. I met him for the first time in Berlin in 1991, when he was being feted for the German edition of his latest book. A smiling young waitress offered him some decent white wine. Naipaul took the bottle from her hand, examined the label for some time, like a fine art dealer inspecting a dubious piece, handed the bottle back, and said with considerable disdain: “I think perhaps later, perhaps later.” (Naipaul often repeated phrases.) This kind of thing also found its way into his travel writing. He could work up a rage about the quality of the towels in his hotel bathroom, or the slack service on an airline, or the poor food at a restaurant, as though these were personal affronts to him, the impeccably turned-out traveler.

Naipaul was nothing if not self-aware. In his first travel account of India, An Area of Darkness, he describes a visit to his ancestral village in a poor, dusty part of Uttar Pradesh, where an old woman clutches his shiny English shoes. Naipaul feels overwhelmed, alienated, presumed upon. He wants to leave this remote place his grandfather left behind many years before. A young man asks for a ride to the nearest town. Naipaul says: “No. Let the idler walk.” And so, he adds, the visit “ended, in futility and impatience, a gratuitous act of cruelty, self-reproach and flight.”

It is tempting to see Naipaul as a blimpish figure, aping the manners of British bigots; or as a fussy Brahmin, unwilling to eat from the same plates as lower castes. Both views miss the mark. Naipaul’s fastidiousness had more to do with what he called the “raw nerves” of a displaced colonial, a man born in a provincial outpost of empire, who had struggled against the indignities of racial prejudice to make his mark, to be a writer, to add his voice to what he saw as a universal civilization. Dirty towels, bad service, and the wretchedness of his ancestral land were insults to his sense of dignity, of having overcome so much.

These raw nerves did not make him into an apologist for empire, let alone for the horrors inflicted by white Europeans. On the contrary, he blamed the abject state of so many former colonies on imperial conquest. In The Loss of El Dorado, a short history of his native Trinidad, he describes in great detail how waves of bloody conquest wiped out entire peoples and their cultures, leaving half-baked, dispossessed, rootless societies. Such societies have lost what Naipaul calls their “wholeness” and are prone to revolutionary fantasies and religious fanaticism.

Wholeness was an important idea to Naipaul. To him, it represented cultural memory, a settled sense of place and identity. History was important to him, as well as literary achievement upon which new generations of writers could build. It irked him that there was nothing for him to build on in Trinidad, apart from some vaguely recalled Brahmin rituals and books about a faraway European country where it rained all the time, a place he could only imagine. England, to him, represented a culture that was whole. And from the distance of his childhood, so did India. (In fact, he knew more about ancient Rome, taught by a Latin teacher in Trinidad, than he did about either country.)

When he finally managed to go to India, he was disappointed. India was a “wounded civilization,” maimed by Muslim conquests and European colonialism. He realized he didn’t belong there, any more than in Trinidad or England. And so he sought to find his place in the world through words. Books would be his escape from feeling rootless and superfluous. His father, Seepersad Naipaul, had tried to lift himself from his surroundings by writing journalism and short stories, which he hoped in vain to publish in England. Writing, to father and son, was more than a profession; it was a calling that conferred a kind of nobility.

Naipaul’s most famous novel, A House for Mr. Biswas, drew on the father’s story of frustrated ambition. By returning to the world of his childhood, Naipaul found the words to create his own link to that universal literary civilization. He often told interviewers that he only existed in his books.

If raw nerves made him irascible at times, they also sharpened his vision. He understood people who were culturally dislocated and tried to find solace in religious or political fantasies that were often borrowed from other places and ineptly mimicked. He described such delusions precisely and often comically. His sense of humor sometimes bordered on cruelty, and in interviews with liberal journalists could take the form of calculated provocation. But his refusal to sentimentalize the wounds in postcolonial societies produced some of his most penetrating insights.

My favorite book by Naipaul is not A House for Mr. Biswas or A Bend in the River, his various books on India, or even his masterpiece, The Enigma of Arrival, but a slender volume entitled Finding the Center. It consists of two long essays, one about how he learned to become a writer, how he found his voice, and the other about a trip to Ivory Coast in 1982. In the first piece, written out of unflinching self-knowledge, he gives a lucid account of the way he sees the world and how he puts this into words. He travels to understand himself, as well as the politics and histories of the countries he visits. Following random encounters with people who interest him, he tries to understand how they see themselves in relation to the world they live in. But by doing so, he finds his own place too, in his own inimitable words.

The second part of Finding the Center, called “Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro,” is a perfect example of his methods. It is a surprisingly sympathetic account of a messed-up African country, filled with foreigners as well as local people wrapped up in a variety of self-told stories, some of them fantastical, of how they see themselves fitting in. African-Americans come in search of an imaginary Africa. A black woman from Martinique escapes into a private world of quasi-French snobbery. And the Africans themselves, in Naipaul’s vision, have held on to a “whole” culture under a thin layer of false imitation. This culture of ancestral spirits comes alive at night, when the gimcrack modernity of daily urban life is forgotten.

Being in Africa reminds him of his childhood in Trinidad, when descendants of slaves turned the world upside down in carnivals, in which the oppressive white world ceased to exist and they reigned as African kings and queens. It is an oddly romantic vision of African life, this idea that something whole lurks under the surface of a half-made, borrowed civilization. Perhaps it is more telling of Naipaul’s own longings than of the reality of most people’s lives. If he is always clear-eyed about the pretensions of religious fanatics, third-world mimic men, and delusional political figures, his idea of wholeness can sound almost sentimental.

I remember being in a car with Naipaul one summer day in Wiltshire, near the cottage where he lived. He told me about his driver, a local man. The driver, he said, had a special bond with the rolling hills we were passing through. He was aware of his ancestors buried under our feet. He belonged here. He felt the link with generations that had been here before him: “That is how he thinks, that is how he thinks.”

I was not convinced at all that this was the way Naipaul’s driver thought. But it was certainly the way he thought in the writer’s imagination. Naipaul was our greatest poet of the half-baked and the displaced. It was the imaginary wholeness of civilizations that sometimes led him astray. He became too sympathetic to the Hindu nationalism that is now poisoning Indian politics, as if a whole Hindu civilization were on the rise after centuries of alien Muslim or Western despoliations.

There is no such thing as a whole civilization. But some of Naipaul’s greatest literature came out of his yearning for it. Although he may, at times, have associated this with England or India, his imaginary civilization was not tied to any nation. It was a literary idea, secular, enlightened, passed on through writing. That is where he made his home, and that is where, in his books, he will live on.

The post V.S. Naipaul (1932–2018) appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

On Hyde Park Corner in London, facing the Duke of Wellington’s old house, where one can still see a giant sculpture of a fully nude Napoleon towering over the hall, stands a curious monument known as the Royal Artillery Memorial. A huge sculpted model of a Howitzer gun points to the sky on top of a Portland stone plinth. Around this phallic symbol of deadly force, designed in the early 1920s by Charles Sargeant Jagger and Lionel Pearson, stand a couple of bronze soldiers. And on one side lies a dead artilleryman covered by his greatcoat. The text engraved in the stone under this fallen soldier reads: “Here was a royal fellowship of death.”

The monument commemorates the 49,076 men of the Royal Regiment of Artillery who died in World War I. There has been much controversy over it ever since it was unveiled in 1925. Some of the criticism concerns the questionable taste of paying such monumental tribute to a Howitzer. It might be construed as a crude example of militarism.

In fact, however, the problems some people have had with it, especially in the years soon after the catastrophic war, were about something else. Jagger, a veteran of Gallipoli and the Western Front, wanted to inject a note of realism into his sculptures; the bronze soldiers are not idealized in any way. They look weary, hardened by bitter experience, almost dazed, like those soldiers staring at nothing in the famous Vietnam War photographs by David Douglas Duncan. And then there is the dead man under his coat.

This was not the usual way the Great War was remembered officially in Britain, Germany, or France. Abstractions—tombs of the unknown soldier and the like—were favored, or classical allegories, especially popular in Germany, of soldiers as nude Greek heroes holding up swords, or Christ-like figures expressing the beauty of sacrificial death. One of Jagger’s soldiers, leaning back with outstretched arms, could be likened to a Christ figure, but he still looks far more real than people, or at least military and civilian officials at the time, would have wished for. What the monument shows, despite the Howitzer, is not military valor, but the pathos of war.

The Royal Artillery Memorial is one of the works featured in “Aftermath,” the Tate Britain exhibition comparing the impact of the Great War on artists in Germany, Britain, and France. Of the three nations, France is least represented. The really interesting differences are between German and British artists.

As far as war memorials are concerned, Germany too had its controversies. Official monuments tended to be abstract, heroic, and focused on the sacrifice of young blood for the nation. But one of the most beautiful sculptures commemorating the war is Der Schwebende (The Floating One), by the Expressionist artist Ernst Barlach. A war veteran like Jagger, Barlach went for the antiheroic. The floating figure is an angel with hands folded on her chest and the haunted face of a mother grieving over her sons. (The face was actually modeled after the sad countenance of the artist Käthe Kollwitz, whose younger son died in the war.) The melancholy angel was suspended from the ceiling of a cathedral in eastern Germany in 1927, then removed by the Nazis ten years later as “degenerate art” and melted down to manufacture gun shells. (The one displayed at the Tate is cast from a copy.)

The tension between celebrating the heroic and lamenting the horrors of war was especially strong in Germany. In Britain and France, victory could make up for, or disguise, or at least mitigate the sense of loss. And everything was done to encourage this. In 1919, the British government commissioned William Orpen to do a painting in memory of the Paris Peace Conference. The original idea was to show a tomb of the unknown British soldier set in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles amid the proud figures of various Allied generals and field marshals. Instead, Orpen, who disliked the military brass, decided to paint two emaciated, half-dead ordinary soldiers flanking the tomb of their unknown comrade. The Ministry of Information refused to exhibit the painting. Only once Orpen had erased these awful specters of war was the painting finally displayed at the Imperial War Museum in London.

During the war, too, there was great official resistance to depicting anything approaching the reality of battle. One of the best British war artists, C.R.W. Nevinson, did an oil painting in 1917 entitled Paths of Glory. It shows two soldiers lying dead in the mud in front of the barbed wire of a trench they were perhaps ordered to make a dash for. The real thing undoubtedly would have looked much worse. But the picture was still banned by the military censor. A year later, Nevinson showed it anyway, covered with brown paper inscribed with the word “censored.”

National differences become particularly clear in the depiction of maimed soldiers. Thousands of men in all three countries had half their faces blown off, or had missing limbs, or were horribly disfigured by mustard gas attacks. In France, these men often appeared in public events celebrating the victory and were shown in photographs to remind people of the suffering of common soldiers. This did not happen in Britain. There is a famous series of portraits by Henry Tonks, displayed at the Tate, of men with mutilated faces, but at the time these were only used for medical purposes. It was left to German artists to produce the most gruesome images of battlefield carnage. A famous example is the series of etchings made in 1923–1924 by Otto Dix, entitled The War: rotting corpses in waterlogged trenches, skulls filled with maggots and worms, faces that are barely recognizable as human.

Inspired by Goya’s prints of wartime atrocities, Dix did these prints from memory; he had been a machine gunner on some of the worst battlefields. Whereas Tonks’s drawings were initially only seen by doctors, Dix’s etchings were published as folios and widely shown. Even the techniques of the two artists tell a story. The drawings by Tonks are in pastel colors, not so different in tone from the landscapes by genteel English watercolorists. The monochrome pictures by Dix are dark and aggressive, as though etched in a fury. Dorothy Price writes in her essay for the exhibition catalog:

Many scholars have observed how the corrosive processes involved in the etching technique, in which large holes can be bored into the plate by acid, mimics the expressive potential of Dix’s subject matter.

There is nothing like this in British or even French art. There are French paintings of ruined landscapes, like André Masson’s ochre oil painting La route de Picardie (1924), and pictures of barbed wire, trenches, and bomb craters by British war artists like Orpen, Nevinson, and Paul Nash. Some are very good: Wire (1918–1919), by Nash, for example, gives a vivid impression of the ruined landscape in Flanders or northern France. But the atmosphere is melancholic. These artists, some of whom had witnessed the same shocking scenes as Dix, lacked the ferocity of German artists.

One of the most interesting British painters of the period was Stanley Spencer. Like Nevinson, he had served in an ambulance unit on several fronts. And like so many artists of his generation all over Europe, he was marked by the war forever. But far from glorifying manly action or wallowing in the gore, Spencer related to the dead in an intimate and gently spiritual way. Dead soldiers and horses rise from their battlefield graves in The Resurrection of the Soldiers (1929). In a painting from 1922, Unveiling Cookham War Memorial, villagers in Cookham, where Spencer lived, mourn their kin as the War Memorial is unveiled (see illustration on page 84). But there is no rage in these pictures, just sadness, Christian faith, and a certain air of whimsy; while some mourners look distressed, others in their striped blazers and white ducks lounge on the sun-dappled lawn. The dead are recalled in a country at peace.

This was far from being the case in Germany, a nation that was morally unhinged and torn apart by violent revolutionaries and roaming war veterans lusting for revenge. Compare Stanley Spencer’s Christ Carrying the Cross (1920) with Albert Birkle’s Cross Shouldering (Friedrichstrasse) (1924). Spencer’s Christ can barely be seen as he passes by a very English house in the High Street of Cookham, surrounded by clerics and ordinary folks, looking like angels in the moonlight. Gentle Cookham is a long way from turbulent Berlin, where the torment of Birkle’s emaciated Christ is observed with a mixture of amusement and contempt by hard-faced men and women who, in a different setting, could be among the typical crowd at a lynching. What is missing in Spencer’s art, and that of most of his peers in Britain, is the menacing air of violence.

The historian George L. Mosse, who escaped from Nazi persecution in Germany as a young man, argued that German life was brutalized by the militarism of World War I. People had become inured to death and cruelty. Men tested by the fire and steel of battle were exalted by nationalist writers such as Ernst Jünger. War veterans felt emasculated, humiliated, and useless in peacetime. Only the camaraderie of collective violence would revive their spirits. Mosse wrote in his book Fallen Soldiers, “War itself had been the great brutalizer, not merely through the experience of combat at the front, but also through the wartime relationships between officers and men, and among the men themselves.”¹

This may have been true. But why wouldn’t such relationships—and such experience—have had a similar effect on British and French men? The difference must lie in the outcome of the war. Mosse also wrote:

England and France, the victorious nations, where the transition from war to peace had been relatively smooth, were able to keep the process of brutalization largely, if not entirely, under control. Those nations like Germany which were not so fortunate saw a new ruthlessness invade their politics.

In other words, it was not so much war itself that brutalized German politics as the much rockier transition to peace. The humiliation of losing the war no doubt had something to do with this. It is harder for defeated soldiers to adapt to civilian life than victorious ones. But the militarization of German life had begun well before the war. Kaiser Wilhelm II was already spouting a lot of the belligerent and anti-Semitic rhetoric that was later taken up by the Nazis. And the contempt for democratic politics, both on the left and the right, was much greater in Germany than in Britain or France. Certainly the consequences of wartime defeat were more devastating in Germany: the economic dislocation, the moral collapse, and the harsh conditions in German cities where men and women would do anything to scrape by. No wonder that the prostitute became one of the main symbols of Weimar Period culture, especially in the visual arts.

Like the maimed veterans, war profiteers were a conspicuous presence in all the nations at war. They, too, found their way into paintings. But consider the difference between Nevinson’s portrait of such a figure in He Gained a Fortune but He Gave a Son (1918), and Heinrich Maria Davringhausen’s The Profiteer (1920–1921). Superficially, the two men look remarkably alike: well fed, self-satisfied, thin-lipped, beady-eyed. But on the mantelpiece behind Nevinson’s profiteer is a photograph of his son, who died in the war that made his father rich. The painting is ambiguous, both slightly repellent and sad. Davringhausen’s figure, sitting in a sterile ultra-modern office with a smoldering cigar at his elbow and a glass of wine on his desk, is more threatening; not quite the fat-necked brute you see in pictures by George Grosz, but still swinish enough.

Grosz’s graffiti-like caricatures of life in Weimar Germany express a kind of voluptuous loathing for the dislocated society of postwar Berlin. Men are either wrecks of war, begging in the streets on crutches, ignored by well-dressed passersby, or they are lecherous pigs, obese cigar-chomping bosses, or uniformed thugs. Grosz wrote in 1922:

People have created a rotten system—with a top and a bottom. A handful of them earn millions, while untold thousands have barely enough to exist on…. My task is to show the oppressed the true faces of their masters. Man is not good; he is like cattle.

Bertolt Brecht could not have expressed it better.

What gives so many drawings by Grosz their louche allure is that he reveled in the rottenness he professed to hate. The streets of Berlin, with their cripples and whores and pimps and plutocrats, provided the inspiration for his best art. The British artist who was most clearly influenced by Grosz was the marvelous Edward Burra. He, too, loved painting shady dancing halls, lesbian bars, hookers, and other lowlife characters (not just in London but in Paris, Mexico, and Harlem). His art can be as lurid as Grosz’s Berlin pictures: the strutting prostitute in her pink finery in Saturday Market (1932) or the goons ogling a naked dancer in Striptease (Harlem) (1934). What is missing is the loathing. Burra doesn’t hate; he is fascinated, amused, and invigorated by the seamy vitality of urban life.

Grosz, together with such artists as John Heartfield and Hannah Höch, was part of the Dada movement, a nihilistic, absurdist artistic reaction to the supposedly rational world that produced the slaughter of World War I. Originating in Switzerland during the war, Dada spawned groups in Paris and New York, as well as in Berlin. Parisian Dadaists, led by such figures as André Breton and Tristan Tzara, scandalized people with zany theater performances, ballets, and manifestos. But the scandals were more artistic than political, and often injected with doses of mad humor. French Dada was a major influence on Surrealism.

German Dada was more aggressively political. In the words of Grosz:

If [Dada] expressed anything at all, it was our long fermenting restlessness, discontent and sarcasm. Any national defeat, any change to a new era gives birth to that sort of movement. At a different time in history we might just as well have been flagellants.²

Collage was a favorite Dada form—fragmented images patched together that made no logical sense or were deliberately provocative, such as John Heartfield’s Fathers and Sons (1924), showing Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg with uniformed children and skeletons marching in the background. Heartfield and Grosz also made a grotesque human figure out of a tailor’s dummy, with a prosthetic leg and a light bulb for a head. It was called The Petit-Bourgeois Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild (1920).

Kurt Schwitters was one of the main practitioners of this type of art. He coined the nonsensical word Merz for his collages, sculptures (Merzplastik), and interior designs (Merzbau). The idea was to assemble works from the most disparate sources—he built a kind of memorial column out of old newspapers, photographs, and figurines, topped with the death mask of his first-born child, who died as a baby in 1916. Schwitters explained Merz as follows: “Everything had broken down…new things had to be made from fragments…new art forms out of the remains of a former culture.”

The other movement that fanned out across the world, all the way to Iowa, where Grant Wood did his strangely detached, slightly eerie paintings, was Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity: reality seen and depicted through unflinching eyes, devoid of sentimentality. This was Otto Dix’s definition: “If you are painting a portrait of someone it is best not to know him. I only want to see what is there, the exterior.”

British artists like Paul Nash painted landscapes from this point of view, with the same hallucinatory realism as Wood. But Grosz, Dix, Max Beckmann, and other German artists added a distinctly political twist. Their sharp eyes took in the worst, most brutal aspects of postwar urban life, to protest the hideous social conditions of their society. Their pictures of sex murders, torture rooms, and rape were labeled “degenerate art” under the Nazis. Hitler favored heroic classicist nudes, sentimental German landscapes, or paintings of wholesome blond German farmers tilling the native soil. The “degenerates” were often sympathetic to the political left, whereas the classicists (think of Arno Breker’s sculptures of muscle-bound Aryan males) are associated with the right.

Things were not quite that simple, however. One of the revelations of a recent show at the Neue Galerie in New York, entitled “Before the Fall,” as well as the catalog of a recent exhibition in Frankfurt, “Splendor and Misery in the Weimar Republic,” was that the German artists of the 1920s and 1930s could not always be so neatly classified. New Objectivity had both a “left” and a “right” component; realism could be a form of social criticism but also an expression of restored order. Even those categories could be quite fluid. Franz Radziwill, for example, was affiliated with New Objectivity, was friendly with Otto Dix in the 1920s, and mixed with the radical left. His paintings of airplanes and battleships, of ruined houses under doom-laden skies, owe something to the Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich, something to the modernist fascination with technology, and something to New Objectivity too.

In 1933, Radziwill joined the Nazi Party and the next year painted Revolution, a morbid image of a dead stormtrooper in front of a kind of ghost house with two hanged men outside. Another painting from that period, The Steel Helmet in No Man’s Land, shows just that: a dead soldier’s cracked helmet in a bleak and broken stretch of land under a beat-up barbed wire fence. It isn’t quite clear what these paintings, done in a spooky magical realism, are supposed to mean, especially since Radziwill repainted parts of them after 1945 to conform to changed times. The hanged men were not in the original painting. And he claimed that the helmet picture was a protest against war, even though in 1933 it was seen as a tribute to patriotic sacrifice.

A more interesting artist than Radziwill was Rudolf Schlichter. His 1924 painting of a weary-looking prostitute named Margot, holding a gold-tipped cigarette, adorns the cover of the splendid catalog of the “Splendor and Misery” exhibition. Schlichter was a typical example of what the Nazis regarded as degenerate: an early Communist, a friend of George Grosz, a Dadaist, a member of the New Objectivity, and a painter of Berlin decadence (he was especially fond of high-heeled women’s boots). But in the late 1920s, he spent more time with right-wing intellectuals like Ernst Jünger, whom he portrayed, joined the Nazi Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, and turned to Catholicism. This didn’t stop the Nazis from confiscating his art. After the war, he became a Surrealist, and is sometimes called the German Salvador Dalí.

By the time Hitler came to power, the extraordinary flowering of German art was over. The democratic decade after World War I in Germany was marked by corruption, violence, and vice, and it produced some of the greatest art of the twentieth century. After 1933, under one of the most brutal regimes in human history, German art was lifeless, mediocre, and sentimental. Some of the more conservative New Objectivity artists, like Georg Schrimpf, were still permitted to show their neo-Romantic landscapes. Dix, whose earlier work was banned and who was fired as an art teacher, resorted to painting dull landscapes and family portraits full of just the kind of sweetness that the New Objectivists had tried so hard to avoid.

I believe it was Jean Genet who once remarked that he no longer had any interest in traveling to Germany after the Nazis took over. Once the state itself, and not an urban underclass, had become the main source of crime, art lost its subversive purpose.

The post Art of a Degenerate World appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Bob Silvers, my friend and the editor of The New York Review, died on March 20, shortly after completing the April 6 issue. Together with Barbara Epstein, Jason Epstein, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Robert Lowell, he founded the Review in 1963; for fifty-four years he was either co-editor with Barbara or, after her death in 2006, editor of the Review. Bob worked almost to the very end of his life, which would be no surprise to those who knew him well, including those who have written these brief memoirs.

—Rea Hederman

ELAINE BLAIR

Until I arrived at the Review as an editorial assistant, I had never met anyone who so rarely engaged in idle pleasantries as Bob. His daily language was pared down, accurate, and sincere. I found his example revelatory, and I would ponder his usage and elisions like a giddy college freshman. Bob would never, for instance, wish us a good weekend. Presumably he had no particular investment in the quality of our weekends, and possibly he didn’t even know when his assistants’ weekends were, since we took turns working Saturday and Sunday shifts with him.

But was he also, I wondered, rejecting the implied value of a good weekend? Is the goal of leisure time pleasure? Edification? Novel experience? If we couldn’t settle on criteria, we couldn’t possibly arrive at a valuation, in which case why bother asking on Monday morning how someone’s weekend had been? The rest of us walked around in a fever of sentimentality and superstition, it suddenly seemed to me, sloppily wishing each other good days and good trips and merriment at Christmas. But Bob said only as much as he meant. When I left the office after a night shift of taking dictation, sending out books, going over a manuscript with him, he said, “Thanks a lot!” And it felt like a lot.

Still, it was hard to get used to a professional relationship that was, by design, largely impersonal. There were four of us assistants and we were supposed to be nearly interchangeable extensions of Bob himself, the extra hands he needed to manage so big a job. Usually only Bob communicated directly with contributors, and when we worked on a manuscript he carefully went over every one of our suggestions or marginal notes. We rarely spoke to him about anything that wasn’t directly relevant to Review pieces. This too seemed to me tied up with Bob’s stringent rejection of linguistic and sentimental cliché, including the commonplaces of workplace relationships. Bob did not take us under his wing. He was not our mentor. He did not believe in us. These were impossibilities because the Review’s lexicon did not allow for them. They may not, in any case, be the best measures of a boss’s generosity.

I don’t remember exactly what Bob said when I gave him an essay I had written on spec and asked if he would consider it for the magazine, but I remember that the look on his face suggested that I’d ruined his afternoon. I’m sure that if I hadn’t worked in the office and had simply sent him the piece, he would have rejected it. But I was there, in person, so he gave the piece his attention and a few weeks later handed me something of rare value: an unsparingly marked-up text.

IAN BURUMA

My first communication from Bob arrived by telex in Hong Kong, I think sometime in 1984. It read simply: “When can we expect Keene?” On a visit to New York, I had foolishly blurted out the idea of writing about Donald Keene’s enormous two-volume opus on modern Japanese literature, about which my knowledge was not nearly sufficient to write a serious essay.

But my fit of bluff in Bob’s office had piqued his interest. He had wanted something on Japan. The piece was deemed adequate enough for publication (“very fresh” might have been his scribbled note of encouragement). After that it was “on we go, old boy,” his usual phrase as soon as another piece had been printed. And what a journey it has been.

My life as a writer owes everything to Bob’s editorship. He had too much respect for writers he trusted to wish to change their individual styles. In this respect he was quite different from many editors, especially in the US, who see the words delivered by their contributors as raw material to, as one distinguished editor once put it to me, as though I should be grateful, “get [his] teeth into.”

Bob’s teeth marks never showed. But he had an infallible eye for loose thinking. His brilliance lay in his sense of clarity. He made you think harder. There was no room in his “paper” for fuzziness or vague abstractions. He wanted examples, descriptions, and concrete thoughts. And because he was the ideal reader you most wanted to please, you gradually learned how to express yourself better.

Some people liked to mock Bob’s mid-Atlantic drawl, which owed something to Oxford High Table talk, Plimptonian (as in George) classiness, and Long Island lockjaw. But this was not a mere affectation. Bob was that rare person: an American who loved France as dearly as he loved England, if not more so. The University of Chicago, the Sorbonne, and the best of liberal Oxford philosophers shaped his intellectual life. His clarity came from French thinking as well as Anglo-Saxon empiricism. But he remained deeply committed to the country of his birth. And I don’t just mean the Metropolitan Opera or the Ivy League schools. One of his fondest memories, which he would rehearse when he felt most relaxed, was to have been the only white soldier in an all-black military unit being trained somewhere in the American Deep South.

To me, Bob represented the best of a civilization that was rooted in the Enlightenment. But part of that liberal humanist tradition is openness to other civilizations, hence Bob’s thirst for knowledge about China, Japan, the Middle East, or indeed anywhere that was of interest.

Susan Sontag’s definition of an intellectual as someone who is interested in everything is perhaps an exaggeration. No one can be equally interested in everything, but Bob came damned close.

The idea of civilization that Bob personified is now under siege, not least in the countries that he was most closely associated with. We have lost him just when he was most needed. Our tribute must be to defend what he stood for. On we go. We owe it to him.

DAVID COLE

The package came unannounced, via Federal Express, with two books and a handwritten note: “We wondered if you’d be interested in reviewing these books for us. Bob.” That was thirteen years ago. I’ve been contributing frequently to The New York Review of Books ever since. And that means every word I’ve written—on legal subjects spanning terrorism, crime, gay rights, affirmative action, freedom of speech and religion, and the laws of war—has been handled with exquisite care, obsessive attention, and quiet grace by Bob Silvers. I’ve spent my life teaching and litigating these issues; Bob, who went to three semesters of law school in the late 1940s before deciding he wanted to be an editor, understood them as well as or better than I did.

But that was the least of it. Bob did the same with every article in every issue—on subjects as diverse as opera, history, poetry, education, contemporary politics, jazz, psychology, television, religion, film, medicine, the environment, art, fiction, and drama. From 1963 until 2006, he shared the responsibilities with Barbara Epstein. When she died, Bob never replaced her; he just added her writers to his plate.

To attend to every article in even a single issue of the Review would be a stunning achievement. Bob did it for decades (with help from a small group of extremely talented, devoted, and self-effacing editorial assistants and senior editors). If my experience is any guide, each article went through as many as five or six rounds. What this prodigious production meant was that, even in his seventies and eighties, Bob practically lived at the Review. He was seventy-four when I began working with him. He’d call with an urgent and always perceptive thought about a piece, usually at an inconvenient hour; I always took the call. I’m a morning person, but I had many conversations with him well after 11:00 PM on a weekend evening—from his office.

If Bob was willing to work around the clock on every piece he published, how could I say no to a phone call at an odd hour? He’d inevitably raise a question I hadn’t considered or had thought I could finesse. “Well, I just think the reader will want to know…,” he’d say. And he was always right. When the conversation was done, Bob would just hang up. Never a good-bye. The first five or six times, the abruptness took me aback, so out of keeping with his gentle manners and grace in every other respect. But one soon learned that it was nothing personal; he was just too busy. On to the next galley.

Bob was a consummate generalist, conversant in virtually all fields. He eschewed jargon and the language of specialists, and pushed his writers to say things as simply and clearly as possible, without in any way reducing the sophistication of the thought. Most of his writers had spent decades toiling away in the depths of their fields; Bob ensured that we communicated in ways that those not so steeped would understand. He was a master at the art of translation.

Bob was celebrated, justly, for the publication he fashioned. He received many honorary degrees and awards, including the National Humanities Medal from President Obama in 2013—a man the Review did not hesitate to criticize. But he never seemed to care much about the accolades; to Bob, they were almost a distraction from the work. The only reward he really seemed to prize was the appearance, every two weeks, of the “paper” itself. The New York Review will go on; it will be Bob’s legacy. A week before he died, even as he was confined to his apartment, he e-mailed me with an idea for a new piece. Fittingly, I suppose, he went out without a good-bye, working on the next galley.

MARK DANNER

I began working for Bob Silvers in September 1981, when I was twenty-two and fresh out of college. I was one of three assistants, informally known to contributors as elves and—to us—as slaves. Because of Bob’s astonishing appetite for work, New York Review assistants had two shifts, nine to five and two to ten. I quickly came to prefer the late shift, though this meant in practice that one often worked until eleven or twelve or even later.

The workspace was what is customarily referred to as Dickensian: towering piles of books on his large desk and our much smaller ones, which had a disconcerting habit of toppling over catastrophically at inopportune moments, heaps of manuscripts everywhere, clouds of cigarillo smoke. (Bob at that time was a chain smoker.) As an assistant I would sit behind my small piles of books, place his endless stream of phone calls to writers (“Can you hold for Robert Silvers?”), and listen for the sound of a manuscript or a book or a set of galleys landing in Bob’s outbox. Galleys—this was pre-Internet—had to be sent off by mail, FedEx, or carrier pigeon to wherever in the world the writer was hiding.

Heavily edited manuscripts had to be retyped: a delight for me because it meant deciphering Bob’s handwriting and marveling at the way he transmuted dross into gold, with nary a trace of his own voice trespassing into the piece. He was an arch ventriloquist, able to adopt the tone of any given writer: the artist as editor. The editor as artist. Manuscripts would be worked on, sometimes extensively, retyped, then set in galleys and mailed off to Berkeley, Chicago, Lucca, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge. Even on pieces he had largely rewritten, Bob would scrawl his typical note: “Dear So and So, Great thanks for your strong piece. You’ll see we have made a few small suggestions. Please let’s have changes soon. Best, Bob.” I would marvel that the authors of pieces that had been substantially rewritten would often call and profess themselves astonished that “Bob hasn’t changed a thing!”

During those long evenings Bob had a way of sensing when you were getting ready, however surreptitiously, to slip out the door. He would begin piling material into the outbox: letters to post, galleys to send, books to mail, manuscripts to type. The hours would pass: eleven, midnight, one AM. Again and again the assistant struggling to leave would be forced to shrug off his or her coat and sit back down at the typewriter. Bob fought against being alone—for he knew that soon he inevitably would be.

If one stayed late enough there was a special bonus: at a certain moment he would leap up from his chair and charge into the publisher’s office next door, and in a few minutes one would hear this somewhat gruff and imperious boss chuckling and joking and mumbling endearments. He was calling his lady love, who was just then rising in Lausanne. The sound of his voice at these moments—animated and happy, distracted for once from the piles of manuscripts and the towers of books—was enough to make up for the late hour and the terrors of the brimming outbox. He taught me, beyond editing and writing and so much else, the necessity of devotion.

JOAN DIDION

When I heard that Bob had died, I felt that the bottom had dropped out of my world. I was unprepared for it. I should have been prepared, but I wasn’t, because it seemed impossible. People like Bob don’t die; we need them too much.

Bob always shaped how I thought. I had no opinion I did not run by him first. “New York: Sentimental Journeys” (1991), on the Central Park jogger case, was far and away the hardest piece I ever worked on for this reason. Bob from the beginning knew what the piece had to be—he knew before I did—and he pushed me until I got it there. He knew exactly how dangerous the subject was, and his reaction to this danger was to make it more dangerous. His idea from the first was to get it right, to make it perfect, regardless of whatever negative reaction it might elicit in the city at that moment. When I first turned it in to him, it was clearly too long. His solution was to insist I go further. This meant making it longer. If that piece succeeds at all, it succeeds because he gave me permission to finish it.

I loved having dinner with him. We would go to the Knickerbocker Club on 62nd Street and eat Dover sole and sautéed vegetables and talk about what we needed from each other. From me, he needed a willingness to work, and from him, I needed work to do. He understood this as the fair exchange that it was.

After my husband John died, when my daughter Quintana was very sick, Bob grasped my situation, and blessedly kept me writing—on the Bush administration, on euthanasia. He intuited that I would either work or I would die. He was among the few who understood this.

I knew in 1973 how important he was to my work. I didn’t know how important he was to me personally until much later. In the last few years, our friendship was closer than it had ever been, and I thought about him every day. I wished I could have seen him more, but I knew he needed to keep working.

An editorial note from Bob would open up new possibilities both in a piece and in life itself. What could have been an empty place suddenly flooded with light and understanding.

I will always need Bob.

DEBORAH EISENBERG

It was my great and improbable good fortune to work for Bob in two capacities—once as his assistant in around 1973, and decades later as a contributor. One could say I hardly knew him, yet these experiences and the line between them are etched about as deeply as any marks in the person I feel to be myself.

Having several assistants at a time was indispensable to Bob. Tensions ran high and spilled over largely on us, so through the years Bob inevitably had many assistants, of whom I was almost certainly the worst.

I remember magic personalities orbiting the office, electric excitement and glamour. People who encountered Bob only in his later years might be surprised to learn that when my boyfriend first met him, he said, “But he makes Cary Grant look like a knobbly old turnip!” What I don’t remember is what we assistants actually did, other than wade despairingly through a loam of books, papers, and cigarette ash, and rush off to the post office at all hours.

My first day, Bob asked me to take a letter. After what seemed many hours of rhetorical sublimity declaimed in his startlingly patrician accent, Bob said, “All right, read it back, please, uh…”(What was my name?)

I was clutching pages of incomprehensible scrawl. “Gosh,” I said, “that’s the hard part, Bob.”

One’s hair really can stand on end, I learned in the frozen silence. Bob produced a brief, grim chuckle. “That’s the hard part, Bob. That’s the hard part, Bob…” he echoed, apparently in sheer incredulity.

Bob was severe, Bob was exacting, Bob was irascible—oh, why did he not fire me that day, or on any of the following days, during which I demonstrated equal incompetence, often sobbing? To escape I had to quit.

Many years passed. I was out of town, but a large package found me, bearing the familiar return address. Not possible, not possible…I quaked for a few days before opening it to find a book by a favorite writer of mine, Péter Nádas.

I wrote to Bob, saying that I was overextended as it was, and explaining the many reasons I was unqualified to write about the book. Bob wrote back immediately—countering, with immense charm, each of my points.

He remembered my name now! That note, plus irrepressible vanity on my part, equaled the French Horn of Destiny.

Well, that was the only book ever written that could tempt me to write a review, I thought—until a second one arrived, and the process was repeated, almost exactly.

It seems that Bob had an uncanny, almost diabolical, insight into what book would be irresistible to whom. But also irresistible, it turned out, was the prospect of working on another piece for him. His inexhaustible appetite for exploring the wide world was alloyed with a fastidiousness regarding detail. He attuned himself astonishingly to one’s purposes, and his delight in a finished piece was thrilling.

One feels profound gratitude to someone who wants one to accomplish something that’s apparently beyond one’s reach and who makes it possible to do so. And Bob’s conviction that the smallest elements of expression are the foundation of rigorous thought—that rigorous thought lights up the world—permeated the magazine, issue after issue. The world is in crisis; the loss of such intellectual finesse, curiosity, and force, of such wide-ranging vigilance, is a crisis on its own.

JASON EPSTEIN

When Elizabeth Hardwick, her husband Robert Lowell, Barbara, and I conceived what would become The New York Review of Books during the newspaper strike of 1962–1963, we knew that our dear friend Bob was the only possible editor. Bob, then a brilliant young Harper’s editor, had recently commissioned Lizzie to write an essay on the decline of serious criticism in America, in which she savaged the dismal Sunday book reviews for their “flat praise and the faint dissension, the minimal style and the light little article, the absence of involvement, passion, character, eccentricity—the lack, at last, of the literary tone itself.”

It was with Lizzie’s Harper’s article in mind that the four of us saw the opportunity wordlessly presented by the strike: either create the kind of review that she had envisioned or forever stop complaining. There was no middle ground, no escape, and therefore no discussion. The opportunity—indeed the obligation—had arrived of its own volition. There was no ignoring it. Bob was born to edit the review that Lizzie’s piece demanded. I called him the following day and, to our delight, he immediately accepted. He then called Barbara and asked her to be his co-editor.

That all this came together seems in retrospect to have been a miracle. The first issue achieved just the quality of gravitas and fluency we hoped for. No reader could fail to see the point of our project. What we could not have imagined at the time was the utter greatness of Bob’s achievement over fifty-four years, and the kindness and fairness that accompanied his profound wisdom. Bob was a man for the ages.

TIMOTHY GARTON ASH

We are just sitting down to Christmas lunch in London when the telephone rings: “It’s Bob. We have a dangling modifier on galley D4.” FedEx packages appeared at the remotest croft, island refuge, or East European enclave. The New York Review would always get through.

Bob Silvers was the greatest editor I have ever worked with, and part of his secret was in that D4. First there was a package, usually containing the proof copy of a book and, folded inside it, the unmistakable double-spaced typewritten letter with its famous “we hope that something might be done.” (I remember Zoë Heller joking that she would try this courtly formula when asking her children to tidy their rooms: “We hope that something might be done.”) You could not plead other commitments, because he would give you all the time you needed. There followed more packages, faxes, and e-mails, full of supporting material. When you sent him the article, on which you had sometimes worked for months, you would receive a swift response, usually containing the locution “great thanks,” and a small selection from his personal sushi tray of adjectives to describe the piece (“strong,” “important”).

But then came the marked-up text, with his characteristic scrawl on the margins of galley proofs. His essential questions were also the simplest: What do you mean? What do you really want to say? These comments were written on successive galley proofs—D4 meaning the fourth page of the fourth or D set of galleys. Loving this attritional improvement, I once got to an F galley.

In my mind’s eye, I see Bob forever picking up, perusing, and then casting aside a set of galleys. That casting aside was important, because when he came back to the D galley for the nth time, he would see something afresh. Along the way, there were wonderful long telephone conversations, drawing on his extraordinary range of knowledge and reference. I look back through the online list of my contributions over thirty-three years, and I can remember our long-distance exchanges on almost every one.

I think too of our many meetings, in Budapest, Oslo, Paris, or London, dinners in the New York apartment, lunches in the Japanese restaurant below the office: Bob always in his dark blue suit, alight with geniality, laughter, enthusiasm, and a glint of quiet steeliness. Yet even at the height of his reputation and powers, he also had an endearing touch of vulnerability.

He was never earnest but always serious. His support for dissident intellectuals everywhere was steadfast: Václav Havel, Andrei Sakharov, Nadine Gordimer, Fang Lizhi, to name but a few. Shaped by his experience in Paris during the early years of the cold war, Bob represented the values of the transatlantic West at its best. His was a self-confident but also a self-critical liberalism. The more the Review criticized the dark sides of American policy (in Vietnam, Central America, Iraq, and elsewhere), the more it enhanced American soft power. Despite several brave attempts, no one has ever made a successful pan-European literary review, and so The New York Review remains the nearest thing we Europeans have to one—a common intellectual reference point from Lisbon to Tallin, and from Athens to Edinburgh.

When I wrote about fifty years of The New York Review in these pages in 2013, I reflected on how this liberal, transatlantic West was already under challenge from many sides. There is bitter irony in the fact that Bob has died just as an antiliberal counterrevolution, already manifest in Moscow, Beijing, Istanbul, and Budapest, is threatening the three Western heartlands he knew and loved best: Britain, with Brexit, France, with the rise of Marine Le Pen, and the United States, with you-know-who. We need his spirit more than ever, and we shall keep its flame burning.

ALMA GUILLERMOPRIETO

When in 1998 John Paul II became the first pope to visit Cuba, Bob immediately agreed that I should go. Of course there was never any money for travel, but he scraped something together. I joined a cheap package tour of Catholic pilgrims at a travel agency in Mexico and happily wrote two stories from that trip: one about the pope’s visit and a later one about Fidel Castro, whose infirmities were just beginning to show (although he would hold on to power for another ten years).

Even as we were closing the pope story Bob was on the phone about another one. Shouldn’t I be doing something about human rights on the island? My back stiffened. I dislike categories in general because they narrow down reality, and “human rights,” I said, was one that in Cuba led readers and writers right back to a useless cold war understanding of a Latin American country.

Bob was having none of that. How could we run two stories on a country that had lived under the systematic repression of thought and expression for decades, and not mention it? I grumbled and fought; the summer heat was approaching, I had no sources, a rumor was going about that everyone’s go-to human rights victim was now suspect, and, ultimately, I hated the very idea. Not knowing of Bob’s ties to that institution, I said the whole thing sounded like something worthy of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Well, dearie, Bob said (dearie, unlike kiddo, was in Bobspeak a term not of affection but of annoyance), one’s thoughts go back to those poor men, the writers and the thinkers and those who simply wish to remain apart, held in dark, dank cells for years and years. One’s thoughts go back and linger there with them, and one can’t help wondering, is there something to be done? Are we not obliged to address their situation in some small way?

The argument went on for days. The pope story ran, the Fidel story went into galleys, and Bob wouldn’t give up. In the end, it became a question of being unspeakably rude to him or saying yes, and so I went and reported and wrote the story I should have volunteered for in the first place. Indeed, the situation of dozens of men (men only, at that point) held in prison on absurd charges, in obscene conditions, was intolerable. I was embarrassed for myself and both appalled and fascinated by what I saw. How could we not address, in some small way, the situation of people laboring under such injustice? Bob made his writers better writers by pushing them to think better.

SUE HALPERN

Nine days before she died, I turned in my last piece for Barbara Epstein, which, as one of “Barbara’s writers,” I assumed would be my last for The New York Review. I knew there was little chance she would read it, and even less chance it would be published, but it felt imperative to see through that final collaboration, ignoring the reality at hand and offering up a little normalcy. For months she edited manuscripts while hooked up to the chemo machine, so I could also imagine her, pen in hand, wrestling with words till the very end.

A few weeks later, the phone rang. It was Robert Silvers. “We’ll be sending galleys of your [fill in the blank with an adjective of high praise] article soon.” We talked briefly about the piece, and at length about Barbara, whom we both loved dearly. “What would you like to do next?” Bob asked before we hung up. And with that, I was one of “Bob’s writers,” too.

Packages of books began to arrive unbidden. Tucked inside would be a brief, telegraphic message, something on the order of “see what you can do.” I confess that I was not always happy to find these leaning up against the front door, and I would give them a wide berth for days, knowing that once I tore open the FedEx envelope, I’d be working like mad to master the subject at hand. But I also knew that before long Bob would be calling to wonder if I’d gotten those books, and when I might have something for him. He was wily like that.

I loved talking with Bob. On the phone, for sure, when I could always count on him to leave me with some insight or something to think about, but even more sitting knee-to-knee on the office couch, where somehow, always, we would make each other laugh. The truest thing I know about Bob was expressed in that sound: his delight in the world. If I had to pick a single word to describe him, it would not be brilliant, or driven, or perspicacious, or courtly, or generous, or honest, or curious, or kind, or polymathic, or good—all of which apply—it would be “delighted.” Just look at his eyes in any picture and there it is.

A while ago, a writer with a number of best sellers to her name got in touch after getting her first Review assignment, to ask what she needed to know in order to write for Bob. I was stymied at first, and then realized why: one didn’t write for Bob. One wrote for oneself, and for the reader, and Bob was there to ensure that—to paraphrase (and contradict) T.S. Eliot—every raid on the inarticulate did not end in the general mess of imprecision of feeling. His goal was not to insert himself and his point of view into a piece, but rather to enable the writer to make an argument with clarity and disposition. He trusted his writers to say what they needed to say and they, in turn, trusted him to help them do so. He knew their capacities. Sometimes he knew them better than they did themselves.

“All right, kiddo,” he said, signing off, the last time we spoke. In that conversation he happened to mention that the medications he’d been taking were not working. Honestly, he seemed more concerned about Trump’s immigration policy. He suggested, in his offhand way, that I might read a certain article in Foreign Policy. It was something to think about. So I did.

JENNIFER HOMANS

I always thought of Bob as a brilliant man, all mind. This could be disconcerting, and there was a moment when I thought of him as strangely impersonal and detached. It was 2008 and my late husband Tony Judt had just been diagnosed with ALS and had written to Bob explaining his dire situation. Tony had been writing for Bob for nearly two decades. Before Bob, Tony had been an accomplished historian of Europe. Almost immediately though, Bob pushed him to expand his range and began sending him books on American foreign policy, Primo Levi, Jean Genet, Israel-Palestine, and, later, the Bush years, the Iraq war, and more. He pushed Tony’s writing too. Pre-Bob the writing was academic; post-Bob, there was a sea change and Tony’s prose became lighter, clearer, “strong,” as Bob liked to say.

Bob had become a constant presence in our lives. Which is why I was so shocked when he responded to Tony’s helpless note with a few breezy lines: We’ll be in touch soon! Weeks passed. Then he came for a visit. Tony was feeling low that day, sitting wan and pale in the back room in his corner chair. I felt like I had been living with Bob for years, but in fact he had never been to our apartment. He wafted cheerfully into the room in his suit and scarf, bringing the news of the world with him. After some very British-sounding abstractions about how tough life could be, they immediately switched to politics, and I remember Tony struggling to keep up or care. He was just too sick. It seemed an impossible situation, these two men, all mind, one rapidly losing his body, and neither knowing quite what to say.

What happened next changed my view of Bob, but also of Tony. By then, Tony was quadriplegic and on a breathing machine, writing only with the help of an assistant or whoever was there to be his hands at the keyboard. He started composing pieces at night in his head and reciting them in the morning. He sent one to Bob, who immediately published it. They were back in touch. There would be a series, it was a project, and Bob was right there. But these were not the usual pieces on books and politics; they were deeply personal reflections and memories. Soon after, Bob told me the essays made him think of Central European writers and a memoir form he hadn’t seen for some time. He and Tony had found a common language.

When Bob turned eighty in 2009, Tony composed a note, knowing he would die soon:

More seriously, and I know that I have to stand in line to say this, you will always be an extraordinary editor—by far the best I have ever known and, it seems fair to assert, by far the best there is. You surely do not need me to tell you about the place that the NYR holds in the hearts and minds (sorry!) of hundreds of thousands of readers from Berkeley to Beijing. And, of course, above all, you are a legend in your own time zone. It is a pleasure and an honour to work with you and I look forward to many more conversations and galleys….

Affectionately,
Tony

Bob wrote back with his preternatural restraint:

I just read your words here and wanted to tell you how much they meant to me. Every good thing to you both.

My best,
Bob

Tony forwarded me the response with a brief message:

I think this is the closest I have ever seen Bob get to being moved. I am so pleased I wrote it. Love, T

When Tony died, Bob was still there. Upon the publication of Thinking the Twentieth Century, Tony’s last book, written with Tim Snyder, I called Bob: I don’t know if I can do it, but will you help me if I write something? He said yes, please try. When he received my text, Bob focused on certain emotional words, encouraging me to rein in the feeling, take out the fleshy excess, leave only the bones. I fought for the flesh but he called again and again, telling me how much stronger it would be if understated. I was still in grief: it felt horrible, let it be horrible. But he was looking for a kind of poise. Distance and reflection, even in the face of disaster.

Bob had a classical mind, I think. Disciplined, spare, all emotion distilled. In late December when his partner Grace died, I wrote him a note of condolence. He had always said that she was “marvelous,” “quite a gal,” and she was often tucked somewhere into his notes about the work: “I’m in Switzerland with Grace.” “Grace sends love.” When he got my note, he wrote back as he did to so many with a rare show of raw emotion: “I am nowhere without Grace.” It is often said that people die the way they live, and his death made him come clear in my mind. He died with the woman he loved. Without her he was nowhere. It was poetic, understated, a life well lived. His absence is difficult to accept. He was always there and now he is not.

MARK LILLA

We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of soul.

—Robert Musil

It’s a romantic dogma, rooted in God knows what gnostic heresy, that the world is divided into those who think and those who feel. The Mirror and the Lamp, the Dynamo and the Virgin. And that this is how it should be. Tell a romantic you understand him and you have pronounced a death sentence. It means his wings have been clipped and his soul has begun its descent. Oh, Lord, please let me be misunderstood. What keeps him airborne is the conviction that those are philistines pounding the pavement below.

Countless little magazines and literary reviews have been conceived as a refuge from the crowd, a perch for Icarus. The New York Review was meant to be different. Frustrated by the lazy gentility of American book reviewing and its detachment from wider intellectual and cultural currents, the editors invented a genre for what they hoped would be a new audience. The digressive review-essay style that became the paper’s trademark presumed that a writer could bring intellect to matters of soul without violating either, and that there was an audience for such writing. From the start, the Review was a democratic, pedagogical project.

This I knew when I began writing for Bob Silvers back in the 1990s. What I didn’t know was that the pedagogy was intended for the author as well. Bob was a teacher, one of the greatest I have ever encountered. Many stories have been told of his legendary interventionism—the late-night calls about an obscure sentence, the flood of packages, faxes, and later e-mails with suggested reading, not always to the point but welcome as signs of his enthusiasm. Profiles by journalists could make him appear an endearing fussbudget. But nothing I have read asks the only pertinent question: Why did he take the trouble? Why bother? After all, people now consume so much “content,” so fast, that they don’t notice. Errors in print can be fixed online instantaneously. And besides, we’re all publishers now, so who needs a superego?

What the journalists missed, but his writers knew, is that the process of endless refinement was the point. Bob at work on a manuscript resembled nothing so much as a Jesuit spiritual adviser, minus the collar, helping the novice refine his raw inner awareness. It was a vocation, in the strict sense, an expression of magnanimity. He was determined to see that a book got the appreciation and criticism it deserved. But even more, it seemed to me, he wanted the writer to understand himself better than he already did. You say this, and you’re on to something, but what does it really mean? What are you trying to say? Bob had a profound abhorrence of vagueness. It was the cardinal sin because it was cowardly, a self-evasion. More than once I wanted to tear the hairshirt off. Icarus, c’est moi. He never permitted it because he was more loyal to me than I was to myself.

In reading the Review, you always learn something. In writing for Bob, you became something. It was a gift none of us really deserved. But what gift ever is? That’s what makes it a gift.

JANET MALCOLM

“What are you working on?”
“I’m writing a piece for Bob.”

This exchange, often heard around the city, will be heard no more. Now we will have to write for an imaginary Bob—though on some level we were always writing for an imaginary Bob. He was our literary conscience. He was the figure looking over our shoulders as we wrote, holding us to a rare standard. When you wrote “for Bob” you felt the pressure of a demand to be interesting. You do not bore a genius. You do as good an impersonation as you can of someone worthy of his attention.

The imaginary Bob appealed to the better parts of our writing natures, to our capacity for audacity and unpredictability; and, of course, he couldn’t always rouse them. But the best pieces in the magazine had a shimmer that came from outside of themselves. As one read them a sense of Bob came into the room.

His actual interventions in the manuscripts I submitted usually had to do with questions of fact. He wanted to know more about something, or he wanted something added that he knew should be there. He was after the truth of things, which begins with the facts of things. He seemed to know more facts than anyone else in the world did and to understand their power. In today’s new order of untruthfulness (do you remember the good old order of mere truthiness?) his legacy has a moral significance beyond description.

FINTAN O’TOOLE

The great editor is a chimerical creature, combining contrary qualities in one mind: assertive and self-effacing, commanding and sensitive, infinitely curious and sharply focused, patient and fearfully demanding, wide-angle and close-up. Robert Silvers was the greatest editor of our time because he managed these contradictions with a seemingly effortless elegance. He was able, somehow, to show his writers only the gentler sides—the civility, the patience, the infinite care for the smallest details of an essay. Their other sides—the unbending standards of excellence, the phenomenal drive, the larger mission of which your own piece was but a tiny part—were never explicitly expressed. They did not have to be: writers—and more importantly readers—could never miss the force of their steadfast presence.

The thing that everyone privileged enough to write for Robert Silvers will remember is the mystery of the Federal Express packet of books that would arrive every so often. Mysterious because you had no idea what you were going to get. Sometimes it would be stuff that you more or less knew about; sometimes not. Bob did not believe in comfort zones. In any other editor this might have been eccentric, even perverse. But with Bob it was a deeply serious act of faith. He believed that there is such a thing as the general reader, that public life depends on the existence of a common space in which ideas can be shared, absorbed, mulled over, kicked around. And if there is the general reader, there must also be the general writer. If you were lucky enough to write for The New York Review, you had to be prepared to share what you knew or thought without arrogance or condescension. Sometimes you had to go further and share what you didn’t know until Bob’s quiet demands sent you off to learn it.

What he was doing in this was holding a crucial middle ground. He understood better than anyone else that the public realm has to fight for its existence against two equally great dangers. One is the culture of self-enclosed, technocratic expertise, the hiving off of intellectual life into increasingly minute specializations and increasingly impenetrable professional dialects. The other is the insistence—so much in the ascendant now—that there is no expertise at all, that scholarship and rigor and evidence are the mere playthings of elitist eggheads. Bob’s great gift to civic life was the living demonstration in every issue of the Review that these impostors could be treated with equal—and magnificent—contempt. He held open the space for that great republican virtue: common curiosity. He made this fierce effort seem so natural that it is only in his absence that we realize how hard it is to do and how much it counts.

I always come back in thinking about Bob to his imperturbable courtesy. His good manners were not mere mannerisms. They said something. They were a constant reminder to the rest of us that we owed readers the same consideration—to think things through as best we could, to avoid shortcuts and lazy assumptions, to write as well as we could manage. And to remember that it all matters, that the life of a great journal is part of the life of democracy itself. We know better than we have ever known how boorishness and vulgarity pollute public life. Robert Silvers showed us better than any other editor how courtesy and care sustain it.

DARRYL PINCKNEY

For the longest time I called him Mr. Silvers. A couple of Elizabeth Hardwick’s other former students were his editorial assistants and I hung around the office while still an undergraduate. After college, I got temporary work in the mailroom of the Review. Then one day a parcel arrived at my apartment, a book and a letter from Robert Silvers. Maybe he used that phrase—to see what can be done. I’d never had a conversation of any kind with him before. I’d been introduced, but after that he lived in his own world in the office. Barbara Epstein in those early years wouldn’t talk to me any more than she had to. When it came time to discuss the piece, he was pleasant, talked easily of Jimmy Baldwin, and knew more about my subject than I expected him to. Professor Hardwick—not yet Lizzie to me—had been through the piece before I walked it in, so there was not too much of a painful nature left to say.

I’d sat down scared out of my head and I stood up still scared stupid and down through the next forty years I never, I mean never, got over being scared of him. James Fenton, my partner, could talk with him at length, but in a social setting, I had to let him turn away after two minutes or so. Mr. Silvers, back when, had among his assistants a smart, poised girl who was sometimes absent for elegant reasons. I became her substitute and so spent some hours with him, listening to him talk to others. One New Year’s Eve about nine o’clock I asked him if it would be OK if I went off. He said yes, but it would also be OK if I wanted to stay.

I also remember his tyranny in the office. It was tiresome for Barbara, because she grew up with a father who yelled. I’d gone from Mr. Silvers’s office to the typesetting studio to sitting outside Barbara’s office door and the hardest thing about being her assistant was learning, firstly, that you could not protect her from him, and, secondly, that she didn’t need anyone’s protection. Their battles were over a writer’s argument, a writer’s prose. The Review’s style emerged from Bob and Barbara’s clashes that, looking back, obscured how similar in sensibility they actually were. For me, it was part of the emotional chaos and intellectual thrill of the place. A cool friend who also worked at the Review had to warn me to chill the Review snob act a bit when we were hanging out downtown. The best thing about the Review was some of the people in the office, the friends you made, young writers whose work you fell for. And, yes, there was the education you got or made up for just by reading it.

There’s the first word and then there’s the last word, but even Edmund Wilson was dumb once, Lizzie said. Bob and Grace really loved her, and that was my bond with Bob, love for Elizabeth Hardwick and her love for The New York Review of Books, which, she said more than once, had saved her life.

YASMINE EL RASHIDI

When Bob took an interest in my world, he quite literally opened the world to me. Our relationship began with the Egyptian uprising of 2011, and in a conversation over those initial weeks that extended across months, into years, I lived and thought through with him the most profound experience of my life.

Bob gave me a sense of value as a writer—in the attention he offered, and in the trust. When he asked if something might be done about the Egyptian presidential election, he delighted in a piece that instead examined the particularities of the Egyptian bureaucracy. He sent clips, books, letters, offering you things to think about—consider—but in the end, he was genuinely interested in what as a writer you came back with, in content, voice, form. The Review quickly became my writing home, and Bob my measure, my guide. There was no other reader. He was the one who mattered most.

Bob cared about his writers—not just the legendary ones. He cared about our well-being, our safety, even our personal lives. After sharing an experience I had with Egyptian security that particularly rattled me, his concern grew, and he often called to ask if I felt safe, if I needed anything. He suggested ways I might tell the story, even perhaps “a short story” for the “paper” instead.

He stood by us, too. One of my last pieces for him, about the violent clashes between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood that followed the fall of President Mohamed Morsi’s government in the summer of 2013, generated an avalanche of controversy. Bob had pushed, respectfully, through a rigorous process of checking facts and statements to verify the position my reporting had led me to take—one that ran contrary to that of almost every major international news organization—and once the piece had gone to press, he was unflinching in his support. I heard of the critical and questioning letters from others, never him. He only ever thanked me for writing it.

Bob always seemed immensely pleased to see you. He made you feel as if there was nothing more thrilling—marvelous—in that moment than your company. He had an energy, enthusiasm, and buoyancy that were infectious, and he was magnanimous in every way. When I suggested that I might need some time away from Cairo, he did everything to support and make that possible, helping my passage to New York. And when I shared with him my struggle to write a nonfiction book on Egypt, he gently prodded, asking questions to coax out of me thoughts on the story I wanted to tell. He was the first to suggest that fiction might be the form for me. This was a measure of his openness—his understanding and care and sense of his writers beyond the scope of what was considered their realm; it was also part of why and how he came to be their friend as well.

Over the past two and a half years, as I worked on a piece for him from and about Cairo, we had lunches and exchanged e-mails and letters and occasionally the phone would ring. I walked the streets of my city thinking about everything with him in mind. He seemed unwavering in his patience and encouragement, still completely engaged and enthusiastic about the project twenty-eight months later. A couple of months before he died, in a letter about a novel he was sending me for review, he added a postscript about my “Notes”—as we had tentatively entitled the piece—suggesting that it “need not be conclusive.” In his absence, I feel a void, a sense of disorientation, the knowledge that my “Notes” will never, without his eyes, feel either conclusive or complete.

NATHANIEL RICH

Sharpening pencils, fetching dry cleaning, taking dictation, dodging sharpened pencils thrown at your head—life as Bob’s editorial assistant was unglamorous and often had little to do with editing. It took time to win his trust. As a new assistant, weeks removed from college graduation, I longed for an editorial assignment, the ultimate test of a staffer’s mettle. Bob only handed over essays that he had grown sick of trying to wrestle into coherence. These forsaken manuscripts sat on a corner of his desk, often buried under books, languishing for months if not years—the pariahs of the editorial roster. Bob rarely gave up on them but the presence of this pile was a constant affront, a black mark on an otherwise undefeated record.

My moment finally arrived several months into the job, when he lifted a manuscript from the pariah pile and called my name—itself a minor milestone in an assistant’s life, the direct address. My excitement curdled to dread when I saw the piece: a British lord’s assessment of a Nobel laureate’s monograph about economic modeling. I could not imagine an essay I was less suited to work on. I had defiantly avoided taking a single economics course in college and could not begin to understand any of the technical words the author used, let alone his argument. Ashamed, I admitted as much to Bob.

“Nonsense!” he said.

He explained that my ignorance of the subject, on the contrary, made me an ideal reader for the piece. He leapt from his chair and scanned the shelves behind his desk, where he kept his reference books. Down tumbled The Penguin Dictionary of Economics, Barron’s Dictionary of Finance and Investment Terms, An Encyclopedia of Keynesian Economics, and a half-dozen other volumes, landing with thuds on his desk. All the definitions I needed could be found in these books, he said, before launching into a brief lecture on growth theory. My job, he explained, was to translate the piece into language that even a person as ignorant of economic theory as I was could understand.

This was my introduction to one of the central tenets of Bob’s editorial philosophy. Good writing is capable of bringing to life even the most arcane subjects. Big ideas demand vivid prose. Academic jargon is fatal, as are stock expressions, terms of art, empty metaphors. Dead language not only obscures the ideas it means to describe. It blocks original thinking. Many writers will say that Bob brought out their best prose. He did more than that. He brought out their highest thoughts.

Clarity of prose leads to clarity of mind. And without clarity of mind, moral clarity is impossible. I forgot what Bob taught me about economics but I’ll never forget that.

INGRID D. ROWLAND

After any phone conversation, Bob Silvers hung up with a distinctive, resonant klunk—he was done, he was satisfied, and it was time to get back to work. He called The New York Review “our little paper.” His was certainly an editorial “we”—and who, among editors, had more right to that regal pronoun?—but more importantly, that “we” reflected his sense that the paper truly belonged to all of us: readers, writers, editors, printers, publishers, the people who run newsstands in Athens and Rome and all the other surprising corners of the world where The New York Review has become part of life. Pondered quietly, hotly argued, it outlives the paper on which it is printed through memories of words, phrases, readings, experiences, through conversations between people who have connected with one another because of its existence.

And Bob, like an orchestra conductor or a theatrical director, could fixate obsessively on the tiniest detail of phrasing or punctuation without ever losing his grasp of the whole enterprise. In many ways, “our little paper” is a fluid, ephemeral enterprise, writ on water, as Keats might say, but what does water do? When drop meets drop, the two merge to create a rivulet, a stream, the Amazon. Water moves forever onward, bound for the sea—except when it leaps, on clouds, straight into the sky. However fleeting an article, an issue, or a reader’s reverie may be in itself, the momentum they create, like the momentum of water, is relentless. Bob’s great gift was the ability to guide that momentum in every direction, into the desert, into the darkness, into the light. He lived, ultimately, for love and beauty, and he followed them into that good night.

ZADIE SMITH

A writer friend asked me: What was it about Bob? The edit? Or the commission? Another writer present—who also wrote for Bob—laughed at the word “commission,” and I realized I found it strange, too. Bob didn’t commission as much as elicit, a word whose Latin root means “to draw out by trickery or magic.” He was an expert eliciter. The very first time I wrote for him was because I made the mistake of saying, during the course of a casual conversation, “Well, I’ve been thinking a bit about Kafka.” Kafka! He said the name back to me as if I had just mentioned the very latest literary sensation. “Well, why don’t we see if something can’t be done about that?”

A fairly recent book about Kafka soon arrived at my door, then several others. Then articles and notes and more books. This was disarming. My experience writing for editors up to that point had been confined to British newspapers where the emphasis was upon speed, topicality, and personal alignment with the subject. There’s nothing a British editor likes more than sending out a recent novel about the Berlin Wall to a writer who only last year wrote a novel about the Berlin Wall.

I wrote on Kafka, it ran, we were off. Many more pieces on even less likely subjects followed. Bob gave a lot of freedom to his writers, but the way he handled pieces was the opposite of a free-for-all. It’s a combination difficult to describe. The things you could get away with at the Review you could never get away with elsewhere: Bob wasn’t a grammar weenie; he didn’t rule out the personal or obscenity. He prized rationality and clarity but not at the expense of passion. He taught you not to speak vaguely of “historical context,” or indeed overuse “vaguely,” or suggest that two things were “inextricably entwined.”

But it was more than that. He valued individual sensibilities, more than any editor I ever knew. Though often accused of relying on too small a circle of contributors, it cannot be said that his paper suffered from a uniformity of tone. To read it cover-to-cover was to experience stylistic whiplash, from the conversational to the drily academic, from aggressive provocation to the intimate or dreamily philosophic. Bob’s “paper” was a very broad church with a narrow entrance marked: if it’s good.

I don’t know if he ever realized how little I’d known or understood in the beginning. Didn’t know my favorite Sontag essays came out of this “paper,” or that Bob had edited Baldwin, or known Lowell intimately, or helped edit the early Paris Review. We’d had lunch quite a few times before I learned he was a Jewish boy from Long Island rather than the Bostonian wasp that—from his fancy suits and frequent references to Lowell—I had somehow imagined he was. But being very stupid about lots of things was not a disqualifying trait in Bob’s mind: like an indulgent parent he focused on your peculiar strengths. He was even a little suspicious of formal academic expertise, at least if it came at the price of a readable sentence.

His greatest pleasure was those people who approached his own intellectual ambidexterity: a doctor with a fancy prose style, say, or a president who understood and appreciated poetry. When considering such people he would get a very merry look in his eye—since he is not editing this piece let’s call it a “glint”—and say, “Well, now, he’s really a sort of genius you know, a genius! Ha! Ha!” Always the happy laugh at the end. Other people’s genius aroused no envy in him; it was only ever a source of delight.

About the rest of us he had a clear eye. She’s a bit weak on Iraq but absolutely marvelous on Alexander Pope. He knows everything about the theater but nothing at all about politics. This is presumably what allowed him to decide, very early on, that he wasn’t a writer himself, though I always found it hard to believe: the way he edited was effectively writing. It was like having a second architect appear during construction, suggesting a west wing here or a second floor. You could get a bit petulant about it. Have you considered x? is not always what you want to hear when you’ve just written two thousand words on y. But he was always right.

“Will Bob be there? I owe him a piece.” An anxious query tacked onto many an RSVP for a New York literary party. But even if you didn’t owe him you had to be careful: in company Bob was like a shark in a shoal, trawling for pieces, waiting for unsuspecting writers to drunkenly let slip that they were interested in Sibelius or Croatia or had a theory about Philip Glass. Sometimes the process of eliciting could feel a little like entrapment. Not because he was strict with a deadline, but because to agree to write something for Bob was to know there was no way you’d be phoning it in, you’d be holding yourself to the highest standard—his.

Perhaps the greatest aspect of Bob’s legacy is the generations of editorial assistants he spread abroad. Whenever I am being particularly astutely edited elsewhere it usually turns out that the red pen belongs to an ex-assistant of Bob’s. Thank God—I always need the help. Many of Bob’s writers were Nobel Prize winners, true geniuses, all-rounders of the C.P. Snow variety. They would have written brilliantly anywhere. But there were others, like me, from whom Bob not only elicited work, but helped directly to improve, educate, and form. I loved him for it and I’ll miss writing for him so much.

Additional remembrances of Robert Silvers by more than sixty New York Review contributors and friends can be found at nybooks.com/rbs.

The post Robert B. Silvers (1929–2017) appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

French schoolchildren used to be taught that they were descended from the Gauls, a tribe that emerged around the fifth century BC. It is a common conceit of nineteenth-century nationalism that citizens of modern nation-states can trace their national origins back to a remote past. Not so long ago, a Japanese professor maintained that “Japanese values” were already in evidence more than ten thousand years ago among the Jomon period hunter-gatherers.

Much of this is nonsense. But the Chinese at least have a better claim than most people of being heirs to a unified culture that began roughly in the third century BC. This idea forms the basis of the fascinating exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Qin and Han dynasty artifacts. Almost all the objects lay buried for many centuries in tombs. That is why we can see perfectly preserved lacquer ware from a burial site in Sichuan, richly colored textiles from the far west of China, the body of Dou Wan, wife of Prince Jing, encased in a suit made of jade, and much more. And all these are more than two thousand years old.

In 221 BC, the Qin conquered six other kingdoms in what is now geographically a part of China. Under the first emperor, Qin Shihuangdi—reviled in Chinese history as a tyrant, but much admired by the no less brutal Mao Zedong—the Chinese language was unified in a common writing system. A common currency was introduced, as well as a system of weights and measures. Central power was exercised through an elaborate bureaucracy. The First Emperor also mobilized hundreds of thousands of slave workers and convicts to build roads, waterways, and, most famously, parts of what came to be known as the Great Wall.

The Han dynasty that toppled the Qin in 206 BC was in many ways more humane. Whereas the First Emperor allegedly buried Confucian scholars alive after burning their books, because, rather like Chairman Mao, he wished to start his reign on a clean slate and couldn’t tolerate dissent, Confucianism became the state ideology under the Han emperors. Rare stone tablets from the Eastern Han dynasty (AD 25-220), engraved with texts from Confucian classics, that once stood in front of a lecture hall, were excavated in the 1980s, and are now on show at the Met.

Zhixin Jason Sun, who curated the exhibition, writes in the catalogue that the dominance of Confucian thought “undoubtedly struck a heavy blow against intellectual development, and, consequently, had a lasting negative effect over the next two millennia.” This is one of the clichés of leftist Chinese propaganda. Confucianism, revised endlessly by scholarship over the last two thousand years, is too diverse a philosophy to lend itself to such a sweeping statement. The least one can say is that from the beginning Confucian ideas constituted a secular attempt to devise a moral political order. That it was often used—and still is—as a doctrine of bureaucratic oppression should not obscure its remarkably enlightened origins. Contrary to what the current Communist Party, or indeed the likes of Lee Kuan Yew, the late Singaporean prime minister, have made of it, an important strand of Confucianism, developed by the fourth-century philosopher Mencius, holds that people have the right to rebel against an unjust ruler.

Even though certain aspects of Chinese civilization, such as the uniform written language, do indeed go all the way back to the First Emperor of Qin, it is highly unlikely that most people living under his rule, or indeed in later dynasties, thought of themselves as “Chinese” in the same way citizens of the PRC or Taiwan, or in the global Chinese diaspora, do now. Still, the exhibition reminded me of an experience I had a few decades ago, when I visited the Chinese galleries at the British Museum in London after seeing a show of Russian Orthodox art. It felt like coming back to a familiar world of plain humanity, after being immersed in sacred images meant to awe the viewer in a display of religious power. And there is something rather Chinese about that.

What is striking even of the artifacts produced under the despotic Qin emperor is how down to earth many of them are. The soldiers in his terracotta army, protecting the emperor in his tomb, are not stylized figures, or symbols of otherworldly power, but individual human beings sculpted with a remarkable sense of realism. “Down to earth” is of course a relative concept, since the bulk of the objects on display were dug up from the tombs of aristocrats, whose lives would have had very little in common with the peasants who provided them with their food, dug the canals, served in the imperial armies, and built the first bits of the Great Wall.

It would also be a mistake to forget how different people in the distant (or even the not so distant) past were to most of us in the way they saw the world. Like the ancient Egyptians, the Chinese who could afford to think about such things at all were obsessed with notions of immortality and the afterlife. That is why we can still enjoy the glories of the terracotta soldiers in the Qin Emperor’s vast tomb that was a microcosm of life on earth. There were sculptures of pet animals too, and dancers and acrobats to entertain him, and model palaces, parks, and pavilions. Rivers of mercury wended their way through mountain ranges of bronze. And the bones of his concubines, sacrificed to comfort their ruler in the afterlife, were found inside the tomb as well.

From the First Emperor’s tomb to funerals in our own time, the traditional Chinese view of the afterlife is hardly any different from life on earth. People are still buried with paper money and model cars, as well as food. The superbly crafted Han dynasty bronze bowls, wine vessels, and lamps, and the exquisite red and black lacquer food containers, would have been of practical use to the deceased if they had indeed lived on as people believed they would. In life after death, the Chinese grandees were still expected to take delight in the beauties of nature, splendid animals, good food and fine wines, as well as graceful dancers and bed companions. Having been beautifully preserved underground for thousands of years, these objects delight us still.

One of the attractive qualities of Qin and Han culture, shared by the arts of many later eras, is their cosmopolitanism. Chinese artisans and their patrons loved to adopt and adapt designs and shapes imported from Iran, India, Central Asia, and perhaps even ancient Greece. Golden ornaments with horse motifs that predate the Qin dynasty show the influence of Scythian designs. Gold beads excavated from Han tombs are worked with fine filigree that suggests Persian or Bactrian origins. Even during periods of oppressive central control, China was never really closed to outside influences.

This high level of sophistication creates the illusion that if we were to meet a cultivated Chinese of the second century BC at a dinner party today, we would have much to talk about. It is easy to forget that the past remains another country. But perhaps it isn’t a complete illusion. Despite periods of horrendous violence, savage wars, and cruel oppression, something of the humanist spirit of ancient China has survived. In another thousand years, if mankind is still around, Chairman Mao’s attempt to stamp it out will look like a tiny blip in Chinese history. There is consolation in that.

“Age of Empires: Art of the Qin and Han Dynasties” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through July 16.

The post The Earthy Glories of Ancient China appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Of all the masters of the woodblock print in the Edo Period, Utamaro has the most colorful reputation. Hokusai was perhaps the greatest draughtsman, Hiroshige excelled in landscapes, and Kuniyoshi had the wildest theatrical flair. Utamaro (1753–1806) was the lover of women.

Not only did he create extraordinary prints and paintings of female beauties, often high-class prostitutes, but he was also, it was said, a great habitué of the brothels in Edo himself. Prostitutes, even at the top end of the market, no longer have any of the glamor associated with their trade in eighteenth-century Japan, but “Utamaro” is the name of a large number of massage parlors that still dot the areas where famous pleasure districts once used to be. Even in Utamaro’s time, the glamor of prostitutes was largely a fantasy promoted in guidebooks and prints. He made a living providing pictures of the “floating world” of commercial sex, commissioned by publishers who were paid by the brothel owners.

Three remarkable paintings by Utamaro set in different red light districts in Edo are the main attraction of “Inventing Utamaro: A Japanese Masterpiece Rediscovered,” a fascinating exhibition at the Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C. The last time all three were seen together was in the late 1880s in Paris. The Japanese dealer Hayashi Tadamasa kept the earliest (between 1780 and 1790) and best one for himself. It is called Moon at Shinagawa (1788–1790), and shows an elegant teahouse with a view of the sea. A number of finely dressed “courtesans” are seen playing musical instruments, reading poems, and bringing out dainty dishes. This painting was acquired by Charles Lang Freer in 1903 and is now part of the Freer/Sackler collection.

Cherry Blossoms in Yoshiwara (1792–1794), a gaudier picture of women singing and dancing in a typical teahouse/brothel with cherry blossom trees in full bloom outside, was sold to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, in the 1950s. But the whereabouts of the third picture was a mystery until it suddenly turned up at the Okada Museum of Art in Hakone, Japan, in 2014. Snow at Fukagawa (1802–1806), a little clumsily touched up recently by a Chinese restorer, again shows a tableau of women engaged in various activities—playing the three-stringed samisen, carrying bedding, drinking—associated with a house of pleasure.

In all three pictures, there is an almost total absence of men. These are women on display for the eyes of men, no doubt, advertisements for the sexual trade that played such an important part in the merchant culture of the Edo Period (1603–1868). Politically oppressive, the authorities nonetheless gave license to men to indulge themselves in amusements of varying degrees of sophistication acted out in a narrow and interconnected world of brothels and Kabuki theaters. Sex, kept in bounds by rules of social etiquette, was less threatening to the authorities than political activity. (Utamaro was arrested once, not for his pornographic prints, but for depicting samurai grandees, which was forbidden.) And the roles played by the women in this world, especially the high-class ones, were hardly less stylized and artificial than those performed at the Kabuki.

Utamaro’s personal reputation as a ladies’ man may be as imaginary as the sexual games acted out in the brothels. Very little is known about his life. It is known that he trained as an apprentice to an artist named Toriyama Sekien, who switched from the austere art of the Kano School to making prints of ogres and other fantastical figures in illustrated books.

The legend of Utamaro as a demon of art, as well as an erotic connoisseur, began early on, but was later burnished in a movie by the great director Mizoguchi Kenji, entitled Utamaro and His Five Women (1946), which was based on a novel of the same title. The portrayal of the artist probably owes more to the way Mizoguchi saw himself than to historical accuracy.

The exotic image of traditional Japan as a kind of paradise of sexual refinement, which was already the product of a fantasy world promoted by artists like Utamaro, appealed to sophisticated collectors, writers, and artists in late-nineteenth-century Paris. The pleasure world of the Edo Period was seen as an elegant and sensuous antidote to the ugliness of the industrial age. And the same was true in Japan.

At first, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, when the Japanese were eager to modernize along Western lines, the hedonism of Floating World prints, and the wilder shores of Kabuki, were considered rather shameful. Soon, however, the popular theatrical genres and sensual entertainments of the past calcified in the culture of geisha and in classical Japanese theater, shorn of its wild inventiveness. But the art of Utamaro still retains the old spirit, which now evokes feelings of nostalgia.

The three paintings at the Sackler are unsigned and their provenance is cloudy. They may not be entirely the work of Utamaro. Some experts even claim that one or two of them are not by Utamaro at all. Another mystery lies in their odd sizes, much too big to be hung in a traditional Japanese alcove, or even on the walls of a Japanese house. Yet the subject matter would seem rather unsuitable for display in a temple. Many a fake Utamaro was made for the Western market, hungry for Japanese exotica. But these pictures seem too fine for that.

There are other items in the Sackler show that are well worth studying, especially a number of beautiful prints and illustrated books by Utamaro and others. At the very end of the exhibition there is a large color photograph of a brothel in Tokyo, probably taken at the end of the nineteenth century. We see several rows of what look like very young girls waiting behind wooden bars to be selected by clients passing by. They were virtually enslaved by their employers. Most died of disease in their twenties. It is a reminder that the highest artistic achievements sometimes emerge from the most squalid circumstances.

“Inventing Utamaro: A Japanese Masterpiece Rediscovered” is at the Sackler Gallery through July 9.

The post Myth-Maker of the Brothel appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

1.

The main Nuremberg war crimes trials began in November 1945 and continued until October 1946. Rebecca West, who reported on the painfully slow proceedings for The New Yorker, described the courtroom as a “citadel of boredom.” But there were moments of drama: Hermann Göring under cross-examination running rings around the chief US prosecutor Robert H. Jackson, for example. Jackson’s opening statement, however, provided the trial’s most famous words:

We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well. We must summon such detachment and intellectual integrity to our task that this Trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity’s aspirations to do justice.

How well humanity lived up to these words, after a good number of bloody conflicts involving some of the same powers that sat in judgment on the Nazi leaders, is the subject of The Memory of Justice, the four-and-a-half-hour documentary that has rarely been seen since 1976 but is considered by its director, Marcel Ophuls, to be his best—even better, perhaps, than his more famous The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), about the Nazi occupation of France, the Vichy government, and the French Resistance.

Near the beginning of The Memory of Justice, the violinist Yehudi Menuhin declares that the barbarism of Nazi Germany can only be seen as a universal moral catastrophe: “I proceed from the assumption that every human being is guilty.” The fact that it happened in Germany, he says, doesn’t mean that it cannot happen elsewhere. This statement comes just after we have seen the Nazi leaders, one after the other, declare their innocence in the Nuremberg courtroom.

We also hear a former French paratrooper recall how the French in Algeria systematically tortured and murdered men, women, and children. There are gruesome images of the Vietnam War. And Telford Taylor, US counsel for the prosecution at Nuremberg, wonders how any of us would cope with the “degeneration of standards under pressures.” Later in the film, Taylor says that his views on Americans and American history have changed more than his views on the Germans whom he once judged.

Such juxtapositions are enough to send some people into a fury. The art critic Harold Rosenberg accused Ophuls in these pages of being “lured…into a near-nihilistic bog in which no one is guilty, because all are guilty and there is no one who is morally qualified to judge.”¹ Ophuls, according to Rosenberg, “trivialized” the Nazi crimes and “diluted” the moral awfulness of the death camps.

This is to misunderstand what Ophuls was up to. The film never suggests that Auschwitz and the My Lai massacre, or French torture prisons in Algiers, are equivalent, let alone that the Vietnam War was a criminal enterprise on the same level as the Holocaust. Nor does Ophuls doubt that the judgment on Göring and his gang at Nuremberg was justified. Ophuls himself was a refugee from the Nazis, forced to leave Germany in 1933, and to flee again when France was invaded in 1940. Instead he tries, dispassionately and sometimes with touches of sardonic humor, to complicate the problem of moral judgment. What makes human beings who are normally unexceptional commit atrocities under abnormal circumstances? What if such crimes are committed by our fellow citizens in the name of our own country? How does our commitment to justice appear today in the light of the judgments at Nuremberg? Will the memory of justice, as Plato assumed, make us strive to do better?

Ophuls does not dilute the monstrosity of Nazi crimes at all. But he refuses to simply regard the perpetrators as monsters. “Belief in the Nazis as monsters,” he once said, “is a form of complacency.” This reminds me of something the controversial German novelist Martin Walser once said about the Auschwitz trials held in Frankfurt in the 1960s. He wasn’t against them. But he argued that the daily horror stories in the popular German press about the grotesque tortures inflicted by Nazi butchers made it easier for ordinary Germans to distance themselves from these crimes and the regime that made them happen. Who could possibly identify with such brutes? If only monsters were responsible for the Holocaust and other mass murders, there would never be any need for the rest of us to look in the mirror.

It is true that Ophuls does not interview former Nazis, such as Albert Speer and Admiral Karl Dönitz, as a prosecutor. His role is not to indict, but to understand better what motivates such men, especially men (and women) who seem otherwise quite civilized. For this, too, Rosenberg condemned him, arguing that he should have balanced the views voiced by these criminals with those of their victims, for otherwise viewers might give the old rogues the benefit of the doubt.

There seems to be little danger of that. Consider Dönitz, for example, who makes the bizarre statement that he could not have been anti-Semitic, since he never discriminated against Jews in the German navy, forgetting for a moment that there were no known Jews in Hitler’s Kriegsmarine. When Ophuls asks him whether he really believes that there was no connection between his ferociously anti-Semitic speeches and the fate of the Jews under the government he served, the admiral’s tight little mouth twitches alarmingly before denying everything in the harsh yelp of a cornered dog. This speaks for itself, and needs no “balancing” by another voice.

Ophuls is a superb interviewer, polite, cool, and relentless. His tone is often skeptical, but never moralistic or aggressive. This allows him to get people to say things they may not have divulged to a more confrontational interlocutor. Albert Speer was responsible for, among other things, the ghastly fate of countless slave laborers pulled from concentration camps to work in German armaments factories. Responding to Ophuls’s quiet probing, this most slippery of customers speaks at length about the moral blindness and criminal opportunism that came from his ruthless ambition. Unlike most Germans of his generation, Speer believed that the Nuremberg trials were justified. But then, he could be said to have got off rather lightly with a prison sentence rather than being hanged.

Where Dönitz is shrill and defensive, Speer is smooth, even charming. This almost certainly saved his life. Telford Taylor believed that Speer should have been hanged, according to the evidence and criteria of Nuremberg. Julius Streicher was executed for being a vile anti-Semitic propagandist, even though he never had anything like the power of Speer. But he was an uncouth, bullet-headed ruffian, described by Rebecca West as “a dirty old man of the sort that gives trouble in parks,” a man one could easily regard as a monster. The judges warmed to Speer as a kind of relief. Compared to Streicher, the vulgar, strutting Göring, the pompous martinet General Alfred Jodl, or the hulking SS chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Speer was a gentleman. What saved him, Taylor recalls in the film, was his superior class. When Ophuls puts this to him, a ghostly smile flits across Speer’s face: “If that’s the explanation…, then I am only too pleased I made such a good impression.” In the event, Speer got twenty years; Dönitz only got ten.

Ophuls said in an interview that it was easy to like Speer. But there is no suggestion that this mitigated his guilt. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who also interviewed Speer at length, called him “the true criminal of Nazi Germany,” precisely because he was clearly not a sadistic brute but a highly educated, well-mannered, “normal” human being who should have known better than to be part of a murderous regime. This is perhaps the main point of Ophuls’s film as well: there was nothing special about the Germans that predisposed them to become killers or, more often, to look away when the killings were done. There is no such thing as a criminal people. A quiet-spoken young architect can end up with more blood on his hands than a Jew-baiting thug. This, I think, is what Yehudi Menuhin meant by his warning that it could happen anywhere.

2.

Far from being a moral nihilist who trivialized the Nazi crimes, Ophuls was so committed to his examination of guilt and justice that The Memory of Justice had a narrow escape from oblivion. The companies that commissioned it, including the BBC, did not like the rough cut. They thought it was far too long. Since the film was to be based on Telford Taylor’s book Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy (1970), they wanted more on the Vietnam War and less on Nuremberg. Rejection only made Ophuls, who never took kindly to being told what to do by the men in suits, stick more stubbornly to his own vision. He was less interested in a specifically American tragedy, or indeed a German tragedy, than in man’s descent into barbarousness, wherever or whenever it happens.

Ophuls was locked out of the cutting room in London. The producers put together a shorter version of the film, with a different spin, which was sold to ZDF television in Germany. Ophuls then traveled all over Europe to save his own version. A German court stopped ZDF from showing the shorter one. The original edit was smuggled to the US, where a private screening reduced Mike Nichols to tears. Hamilton Fish, later a well-known publisher, managed to persuade a group of investors to buy the original movie back and Paramount to distribute it. It was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1976, and then in New York and on college campuses, as well as on television in many countries. But for the cussed perseverance of Ophuls and the help of his American backers, The Memory of Justice would never have been seen. In Fish’s words, “You needed his type of personality to make such a film. He took history on personally.”

After its initial run, however, the movie disappeared. Contracts on archival rights ran out. The film stock was in danger of deteriorating. And so a documentary masterpiece could easily have been lost if Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation had not stepped in with Paramount to put it all back together again, a labor that took ten years and was completed in 2015.

Much has changed, of course, since 1976. Germany is a different country now, geographically, politically, and culturally. When Ophuls talked to Dönitz, the West German establishment was still riddled with former Nazis. Most of the wartime generation masked their dirty secrets with evasions or shabby justifications. The history of the Third Reich, in the words of Eugen Kogon, a Holocaust survivor and the first German historian to write about the camps, was still “the corpse in the cellar.”

Quite ordinary people, like the smiling man encountered by Ophuls in a small town in Schleswig-Holstein, still remembered the Third Reich with great fondness as an orderly time when people knew how to behave and there was “no problem of crime.” Ophuls happened to meet this friendly burgher while he was trying to track down a female doctor who had been convicted at Nuremberg for murdering children in concentration camps by injecting oil into their veins, to name just one of her grisly experiments. After she was released from prison in 1952, she continued for a time to practice as a family doctor. She was, it appears, well respected, even friendly.

When Ophuls finally managed to find her, she very politely declined to be interviewed, since she was in poor health. Another former concentration camp doctor, Gerhard Rose, did agree to talk, however, but only to deny any guilt, claiming that his medical experiments (infecting victims with malaria, for example) served a humanitarian purpose, and that the US Army performed experiments too. Ophuls observes, quite rightly, that American experiments were hardly conducted under the kind of circumstances prevailing in Dachau and Buchenwald. But the hypocrisy of the Western Allies in this matter might have been better illustrated by pointing out that German and Japanese doctors who committed even worse crimes than Dr. Rose were protected by the US government because their knowledge might come in handy during the cold war.²

Perhaps the most disturbing interview in the movie is not with an unrepentant Nazi or a war criminal, but with the gentlemanly and highly esteemed lawyer Otto Kranzbühler. A navy judge during the war, Kranzbühler was defense counsel for Admiral Dönitz at Nuremberg, where he cut a dashing figure in his navy uniform. He later had a successful career as a corporate lawyer, after defending the likes of Alfried Krupp against accusations of having exploited slave labor. Kranzbühler never justified Nazism. But when asked by Ophuls whether he had discussed his own part in the Third Reich with his children, he replied that he had come up with a formula to make them understand: if you were ignorant of what went on, you were a fool; if you knew, but looked the other way, you were a coward; if you knew, and took part, you were a criminal. Were his children reassured? Kranzbühler: “My children didn’t recognize their father in any of the above.”

It was a brilliant evasion. But Kranzbühler was no more evasive than the French prosecutor at Nuremberg, the equally urbane Edgar Faure, who had been a member of the Resistance during the Nazi occupation of France. Ophuls asked him about French war crimes during the Algerian War of Independence, when torture was systematically applied, civilians were massacred, and prisoners were thrown out of helicopters, a practice that later became widespread under South American military regimes. “Well,” said Faure, “events do get out of hand. But you can’t really criticize politicians who have the difficult task of running the government.” Edgar Faure was prime minister of France during part of that war.

The 1970s were a critical time in Germany. There were still people, like the son of the former Waffen SS officer interviewed by Ophuls, who believed that the Nazi death camps were a lie, and it was the Americans who built the gas chambers in concentration camps. But the postwar generation had begun to question their parents amid the student revolts of the 1960s. Just a year after The Memory of Justice was completed, radicalism in Germany turned toxic, when members of the Red Army Faction murdered bankers, kidnapped industrialists, and hijacked planes, all in the name of antifascism, as though to make up for their parents’ complicity with the Nazis.

German families were torn apart by memories of the war. Ophuls includes his own not uncomplicated family in the film. His German wife, Regine, the daughter of a Wehrmacht veteran, speaks openly to American students about her own childhood under the Nazis. One of their teenaged daughters talks about the need to come to terms with the past, even though their mother finds seventeen a little too young to be confronted with images of concentration camps. Then Regine says something personal that cuts to the core of her husband’s life and work. She wishes sometimes that Ophuls would make films that were not about such dark matters. What kind of films? he asks. Lubitsch films, she replies, or My Fair Lady all over again. We then hear Cyd Charisse singing “New Sun in the Sky” from The Band Wagon (1953), while watching Ophuls in a car on his way to find the doctor who murdered children in concentration camps.

This is typical of the Ophuls touch, show tunes evoking happier times overlapping with memories of horror. The motive is not to pile on cheap irony, but to bring in a note of autobiography. His father was Max Ophuls, the great director of Liebelei (1933), La Ronde (1950), and Lola Montès (1955). Max was one of the geniuses of the exile cinema. Memories of a sweeter life in imperial Vienna or nineteenth-century France are darkened in his films by a sense of betrayal and perverse sexuality.

Nostalgia for better days haunted his son, who spent his youth on the run from terror with a father whose genius he always felt he couldn’t live up to. He would have loved to direct movies like La Ronde. Instead he made great documentary films about the past that won’t let him go, about Vichy France, or Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo butcher of Lyon, or Nuremberg. The true horror stories are mixed in all his work, as in a collage, with songs from pre-war Berlin music halls and Hollywood movies.

One of the most unforgettable examples of the Ophuls touch is a scene in a film that has almost never been viewed (another bitter fight with producers). November Days (1991) is about the fall of the Berlin wall. One of the people he interviews is Markus Wolf, the former East German spy chief, whose father, the Communist writer Friedrich Wolf, had known Max Ophuls in pre-war Berlin. While Markus dodges every question about his past with blatant lies, we hear music from one of Max’s movies slowly swell on the soundtrack as Marcel thinks out loud to himself how lucky he was that his father decided to move west instead of east.

3.

In the second half of The Memory of Justice, the focus shifts from east to west, as it were, from Germany to France and the US. Daniel Ellsberg, speaking of Vietnam, says that “this war will cause us to be monstrous.” We hear stories from men who were there of American soldiers murdering civilians in cold blood. We hear a Vietnam veteran talk about being told to shut up by his superiors when he reports a massacre of civilians ordered by his commanding officer. We hear Ellsberg say that no one higher than a lieutenant was ever convicted for the mass killing of Vietnamese civilians by US soldiers in My Lai.

On the French side, stories about summary executions and the use of torture during the Algerian War (1954–1962) are followed by a crucial question put by Ophuls to Edgar Faure, the former Nuremberg prosecutor and later prime minister of France: Did he, Edgar Faure, think the French would have accepted an international commission that would judge, on the basis of Nuremberg, what the French did in Algeria? No, said Faure, after a pensive suck on his pipe, since one cannot compare the invasion of another country to the actions taken by a sovereign state in its own colony.

Sir Hartley Shawcross, the British prosecutor at Nuremberg, speaking to Ophuls in his elegant country house in Sussex, remembers how much his American colleagues had believed in justice and the rule of law. Like other British officials at the time, he took a more cynical view: “All law is created by the victors for the vanquished.” What mattered in his opinion, however, was not who made the laws, but whether the principles were right. About this he had little doubt.

Looking back, Otto Kranzbühler shared Shawcross’s memory of American idealism. But he believed that as a model for the future, Nuremberg had been a failure. The trial, as he saw it, presupposed a united world community in which wars would be a thing of the past. This illusion did not last long.

In fact, the trial was tainted from the beginning, not only because among the men who judged the Nazi leaders were Soviet veterans of Stalin’s bloody show trials, but also because Allied war crimes could not even be mentioned. A former British officer involved in the wartime bomber command had no doubt that the destruction of Dresden was a war crime.

If The Memory of Justice has a weakness, it is that this second half of the film, concentrating on French and American war crimes, is not quite as gripping as the first half about the German legacy of Nuremberg. Perhaps Ophuls’s heart was not in it to the same extent. Or perhaps no matter what one thinks of My Lai or Algiers, they are overshadowed by the sheer scale and savagery of the Nazi crimes.

Then again, pace Rosenberg, Ophuls doesn’t suggest that they are equivalent. What is comparable is the way people look away from, or justify, or deny what is done in their name, or under their watch. The wife of a US marine who died in Vietnam, living in a house stuffed with flags and military memorabilia, simply refuses to entertain the idea that her country could ever do anything wrong. More interesting, and perhaps more damning, is the statement by John Kenneth Galbraith, an impeccably liberal former diplomat and economist. His view of the Vietnam War, he tells Ophuls, had been entirely practical, without any consideration of moral implications.

Vietnam was not the Eastern Front in 1943. My Lai was not Auschwitz. And Galbraith was certainly no Albert Speer. Nevertheless, this technocratic view of violent conflict is precisely what leads many people so far astray under a criminal regime. In the film, Ellsberg describes the tunnel vision of Speer as “controlled stupidity,” the refusal to see the consequences of what one does and stands for.

This brings to mind another brilliant documentary about controlled stupidity, Errol Morris’s The Fog of War (2003), featuring Robert McNamara, the technocrat behind the annihilation of Japanese cities in World War II and the escalation of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. To him, the deliberate killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians was a mathematical problem. Only many years later did he admit that if the US had lost World War II, he could certainly have been indicted as a war criminal.

Even more chilling is another documentary by Morris, which received less attention than The Fog of War. In The Unknown Known (2013), we see Donald Rumsfeld, another gentlemanly technocrat, shrug his shoulders about Vietnam, commenting that “sometimes things just don’t work out.” When, as the result of another war in which he was even more intimately involved, Baghdad was convulsed in anarchic violence, he notoriously remarked that “stuff happens.” This is what Hannah Arendt called a “criminal lack of imagination.”

Perhaps the US in 1945 set its ideals too high. But it is a tragedy that the same country that believed in international law, and did so much to establish the norms of justice, has done so little to live up to them. The US is not even a signatory to the International Criminal Court, a flawed institution like the Nuremberg tribunal, but a necessary step in the right direction. No one can hold the greatest military power on earth accountable for what it does, not for torture rooms in Abu Ghraib, not for locking people up indefinitely without trial, not for murdering civilians with drones.

For Germans living under the Third Reich it was risky to imagine too well what their rulers were doing. To protest was positively dangerous. This is not yet true for those of us living in the age of Trump, when the president of the US openly condones torture and applauds thugs for beating up people at his rallies. We need films like this masterpiece by Ophuls more than ever to remind us of what happens when even the memories of justice fade away.

The post Fools, Cowards, or Criminals? appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

One of Moriyama Daidō’s most famous black-and-white photographs is of a stray dog, a bit wolfish, with matted hair, looking back into the camera watchfully, with a hint of aggression. He took the picture in 1971 in Misawa, home to a large US Air Force base, in the northeast of Japan. Moriyama has described this dog picture as a kind of self-portrait:

I wander around, glare at things, and bark from time to time…. Something there is close to how I look at things and to how I probably appear when I’m wandering. Having become a photographer, I always sensed that I have strayed.

Most people can come up with a decent photograph once in a while, which will look like millions of other photographs. Only the greatest photographers can be easily identified by a unique personal style. Moriyama is one of them. There are some recurring images, in different settings, in color and black-and-white, many of which appear in the three books under review: the grainy close-up of a torn pornographic film poster on a peeling wall; a woman’s legs in mesh tights picked out in a crowded street; a filth-strewn back alley crisscrossed with electric wires; a blown-up newspaper photograph; net curtains in a cheap hotel room; a dilapidated old bar with broken neon lights. Moriyama has an exact eye for the textures of urban life, often decaying, ephemeral, sadly alluring in their temporary shine. In his photographs even inanimate objects, such as pipelines or motorcycle engines, have a vaguely anthropomorphic air about them; they look sexy.

The art of the ephemeral, the melancholy of the fleeting moment, has a long history in Japanese art, but Moriyama has focused his sensibility not on such traditional clichés as the cherry blossom (although in fact he has done that too), but on the commercialized, Americanized, plastic-fantastic, sometimes violent, sometimes erotic surfaces of the modern city. Christopher Isherwood once said about Los Angeles, the city he made his own:

What was there, on this shore, a hundred years ago? Practically nothing. And which, of all these flimsy structures, will be standing a hundred years from now? Probably not a single one. Well, I like that thought. It is bracingly realistic. In such surroundings, it is easier to remember and accept the fact that you won’t be here, either.

The urban sprawl of Southern California, with its billboards, strip malls, and pastiche architecture offering dreams of other places, has been a kind of model for postwar Japanese cities, which often look like much denser versions of Los Angeles. Not only was Tokyo almost entirely destroyed twice in the twentieth century—the first time by a firestorm following the terrible earthquake of 1923 and the second time by B-29 bombers in 1945, when much of the city went up in flames once more—but after the war it was rebuilt very fast in a nationwide scramble for economic revival under American tutelage. To find elements of traditional beauty in modern Tokyo or Osaka, where Moriyama grew up, you have to look very carefully around all the modern mess. The art of Moriyama is to ignore those pretty bits and make the messy look beautiful.

Moriyama is not the only artist to work that vein. Reveling in the dirt of postwar urban life has been the mark of many Japanese filmmakers, dancers, novelists, manga artists, and photographers. Moriyama has collaborated with several of them, such as the playwright, poet, and film director Terayama Shūji and the Butoh dancer Hijikata Tatsumi, both of whom used the Tokyo streets as the backdrop of their performances, which were photographed in the 1960s by the young Moriyama.

A huge influence on Moriyama in those days was the photographer Tōmatsu Shōmei, who was eight years older (Moriyama was born in 1938). Tōmatsu’s attitude toward what the Americans had wrought in Japan, during the military occupation but also during the period that followed, when American-style commercial culture wiped out much of what was left of Japanese tradition, was a combination of rage and fascination. This, too, was rather typical of Japanese artists of his generation.

Tōmatsu’s angry enchantment resulted in an extraordinary series of photographs, all in black-and-white, made in and around US military bases in Okinawa and other parts of Japan. There is hostility in his pictures of GIs snarling at the camera or wrapping their meaty arms around petite Japanese bar hostesses, or of massive B-52 bombers flying low over rice paddies as they come roaring into Misawa or Kadena Air Base. But the Coca-Cola culture and the neon-lit bars and the large foreigners in jeeps with money to burn had a glamorous appeal too. Many Japanese men of Tōmatsu’s age felt humiliated by the overpowering presence of alien victors on their soil and envious at the same time of their free and easy ways, their wealth, their sharp uniforms and cool aviator shades. The occupation also contained the possibilities of greater freedom.

There is less evidence of anger than of fascination in Moriyama’s photographs, some of them taken around the same US bases. Like many other Japanese, he was influenced by Americans whose art was an expression of rebellion against the conventional values of their own culture. The filmmaker Oshima Nagisa, for example, was a fierce critic of US political influence on postwar Japan, yet he was bowled over by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Moriyama was a passionate reader of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. But his real hero was the American photographer William Klein, whose book on New York, published in 1956, was a revelation: the in-your-face close-ups of city crowds, the edginess, the violent allure, the high contrast, tilted angles, and rough, grainy texture.

Moriyama was shocked by Klein’s pictures of street kids pointing a gun at the camera, brightly lit cinema marquees, dead stares of people in the subway, and so on. “Klein’s images,” Moriyama later recalled, “made me realize the limitless freedom, beauty, and tenderness of photographic art.” In 1961, Klein came to photograph Tokyo in the same free, kinetic manner, poking his camera into bathhouses, subways, hair salons, and squalid back streets—all the things Japanese officials desperately keen to show their country off to its best advantage would have liked to hide from foreign eyes, and all the things young photographers like Moriyama found immensely stimulating. One of the most stunning photographs taken by Klein was of Hijikata’s half-naked Butoh dance troupe striking weird poses in a rainy Tokyo alley. On the right you can just see the veteran dancer Ohno Kazuo in drag.

That same year, Moriyama was assisting Hosoe Eikoh on a famous book of photographs of the writer Mishima Yukio, posing naked or dressed in nothing but a loincloth, together with some of Hijikata’s dancers. Not long after that, Moriyama struck out on his own, roaming the streets of Shinjuku, an area of Tokyo that combined the seediness of Times Square in the 1960s and the avant-garde glamor of downtown New York in the 1970s. It was there, around the exit of the teeming railway station, that underground theater troupes performed and anti–Vietnam War demonstrators gathered. Shinjuku had department stores and cinemas, but also warrens of tiny streets lined with bars that once had been brothels.

Prowling the streets of Shinjuku’s Kabukicho, a dense cluster of alleys with bars, strip clubs, massage parlors, comedy clubs, jazz coffee shops, and short-time hotels, Moriyama photographed details that echoed Klein’s work but showed different aesthetic preoccupations. Klein was interested in faces and crowds and the way people move their bodies. Moriyama—and here Warhol was also an influence—was interested in the dreams that cities sell: posters, neon signs, newspapers, clothes, porn magazines, and movies. He has described Shinjuku “as a giant stage backdrop, sometimes as an expanded gekiga [illustrated story], an eternal shantytown…. Mysteriously, there is no sense of time: almost no trace of the passing of time can be found here, the time that every city experiences in its own way.”

What traces history had left in this modern labyrinth were not in buildings but in facsimiles of the past, which Moriyama often photographed: television shows glimpsed in shop windows, advertising using traditional images, close-ups of movie screens. There was only one instance when a historic time was fixed in Shinjuku, according to Moriyama, and that was when “Shinjuku was radiantly radical at the end of the 1960s, a single occasion which caused October 21, 1968 to be inscribed in its annals. All time before and after this date has completely disappeared from its history.”

This is a slight exaggeration. October 21, 1968, is when Shinjuku erupted in student riots on International Anti-War Day. Such violent demonstrations have not been repeated since, but even that date is now largely forgotten. In 1968, Moriyama was part of a group of “engaged” young photographers involved in a short-lived magazine called Provoke, whose aim was to express social and political protest. It included figures like Taki Kōji and Nakahira Takuma, who photographed student demonstrations from the point of view of active supporters. A handsome book, entitled Provoke—which was published to coincide with an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in early 2017—shows the work of all these photographers, including Moriyama. Some of the interviews are as illuminating as the pictures.

Moriyama was not as political as his colleagues. Once, after being dragged along to a student demo, he quickly made his escape. Moriyama remembered: “When we were doing Provoke, after midnight Taki Kōji and Nakahira would gather people, and they would all talk politics. I wasn’t interested in the discussion at all, so I would be in the darkroom or in a bar in Shinjuku, drinking.”

Moriyama did some of his best work at that time. His finest book, in my view, is his first, Nippon Gekijo Shashincho (Japan: A Photo Theater), published in 1968. This beautifully designed volume contains wonderful photographs of actors in a backstreet theater, performing as heroes and villains in versions of old kabuki plays. You can almost smell their greasepaint and the cheap rice crackers noisily consumed by the plebeian audience. He also included pictures of actors in Terayama’s underground theater group, Tenjō Sajiki, looking more like carnival freaks: a fat lady, a midget, mustachioed men in drag. The famous stray dog is in this collection too. There are some pictures of rain-streaked, neon-lit Shinjuku streets at night, and a gritty photo of plump country girls strutting as American-style majorettes.

As was true in many parts of the world, sexual liberation and political protest were part of the same culture in 1960s Japan. Moriyama was drawn to the former. His most memorable work for Provoke was a series of blurred photographs of his sexual encounter with a woman in a hotel room: the naked woman on all fours, the same woman clutching the sheets, hiding her face, or taking a shower. This was the kind of thing that Araki Nobuyoshi, in a far raunchier fashion, would turn into his trademark some years later. Araki’s chronicles of Shinjuku nightlife, and his own sexual predilections, made him a world-famous photographer. But at the time, he was still working for an advertising agency, eyeing the Provoke group with a sense of envy: “I was especially jealous of Mr. Moriyama’s love affairs in the second issue.”

But the eroticism in Moriyama’s photographs is more often voyeuristic than participatory. Apart from women’s legs, glimpsed on subway cars, in crowds, and so on, a recurring obsession is with women’s lips, glossy, pouting, usually shot in extreme close-up, seen on a billboard, on a TV commercial, or in a magazine. The sexualization of life in postwar Japan, in visual media, was partly commercial, a way to draw people to buy products, and partly, in the hands of artists, a form of protest against bourgeois respectability and conventional mores. Some of the radical political activists who had hoped for a revolution in the 1960s turned to making pornographic films, sometimes with a political pretense, when the revolution failed to materialize.

Moriyama was never a pornographer. But he was part of the protest generation. What Japanese artists in the 1960s and 1970s protested against, apart from the Vietnam War, was not so much “US imperialism” or Westernization per se as the primness of official Japanese culture, which aimed to gain the respect of the outside world by mimicking Western high culture in a stultifying way. One of the reasons Butoh dancers, photographers, writers, and filmmakers turned to eroticism was that they meant to strip the prissy Western veneer off contemporary Japanese culture. They tried to find a way back to something essentially Japanese by probing into the earthiest, darkest, most primitive features of life. Words like dorokusai (stinking of earth) or dochaku (native) were commonly used. This often involved reviving some of the least respectable aspects of Japanese culture. Araki, for example, compared himself to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century erotic woodblock print artists, who depicted prostitutes having sex with their clients.

Moriyama also got caught up for a time in this quest for the muddy and the native. In the early 1970s, he decided to abandon Tokyo and started photographing rural scenes, Shinto shrines, and even cherry blossoms, in an attempt to find some semblance of the “authentic” Japanese spirit: “I wanted my heart and soul to ‘return home.’” These were not conventional photos of Japanese tradition. The cherry blossoms are hidden in a gloomy murk; the temples and shrines are made to look almost grotesque; and even in rural Japan, Moriyama’s eye is more easily drawn to tawdry bars and shabby hotel rooms than to the bucolic life. What he caught in these pictures, collected in a book called Tales of Tono (1976),^* were the ghostly images of Japanese tradition, not the glossy idealized culture promoted by Japanese tourist bureaus or depicted by more conventional photographers.

This essay into the native spirit did not last long. Or perhaps a better way of putting this is to say that Moriyama found more of that spirit in the seediness of Tokyo’s backstreets. In one of these streets, somewhere in Shinjuku, he opened a gallery and photography workshop in 1976. As an aspiring photographer myself, I met him there once or twice. I cannot remember much of what he told us in the workshop. Not a great deal, I suspect. He was a shy man with long hair and a slight nervous tic, not given to talk. We did establish a certain rapport over a shared love for the more squalid areas of Osaka. And he spoke a great deal about his enthusiasm for William Klein.

When in 2012 the Tate Gallery in London staged a big exhibition of Klein’s work together with Moriyama’s, the latter took this as a singular honor. I am sure the sentiment was heartfelt. But of the two photographers, it was Moriyama who really stood out in the show. Klein may have been the greater innovator, at least in the 1950s. But he didn’t sustain his high standard. After the series of books he did of great cities—New York, Tokyo, Moscow, Rome—he tried to reinvent himself, rather like Robert Frank, in more experimental work, some of it in cinema. His films were rarely as interesting as those early pictures, though; and where he does go back to his original style—the crowds, the close-ups, and so on—the photos look like tired imitations of what was fresh once.

Moriyama never really departed from his urban, sensual obsessions. Like many Japanese artists, he didn’t try so much to reinvent himself—a Western modernist idea that never quite caught on in Japan—as to refine a style he had come to as a young man. When artists become commercially successful, there is great pressure to repeat their success over and over and produce too many books. This has happened to a number of photographers, by no means all Japanese. Moriyama probably does publish too much. But the quality and interest of his work has rarely wilted.

This may have something to do with the nature of his imagination. The worldwide fame of Araki has led to commissions to photograph outside Japan. Surrounded by an entourage of assistants, he tries to replicate his street photography in such varied locales as Venice, Paris, and New York. It rarely works. In the way that George Grosz needed the stimulation of Weimar Berlin and couldn’t repeat his earlier success in New York, Araki needs to be in his own Tokyo milieu. But Moriyama, like Grosz’s contemporary Max Beckmann, lives more inside his own head. That is why, again like Beckmann, he can work anywhere.

Whether he is in Shinjuku, downtown Los Angeles, Honolulu, or Antwerp, Moriyama’s eye is drawn to the same things: the sinuous tubes, the women’s legs, the glossy lips, the shiny motorbikes, the rain-soaked streets, the advertising. But he finds new and interesting ways to photograph them. Two recent books, Daidō Moriyama: Record and Daido Tokyo, show some of his best contemporary work. It looks a little more polished. But the artificial garishness that marked his earlier black-and-white pictures is just as effectively rendered, if not more so, in color. Moriyama doesn’t need Tokyo to give us his vision of modern urban life, of the marks human beings have made on the world. These are often lurid, ugly, aggressive, and destructive. But they can also contain a perverse kind of beauty. It takes a great artist like Moriyama to make us see it.

The post Stray Dog appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Everything works perfectly in Bartlett Sher’s brilliant new production of My Fair Lady. The sets (by Michael Yeargan) are wonderful; the costumes (Catherine Zuber) are splendid; and the cast, led by Lauren Ambrose as Eliza and Harry Hadden-Paton as Higgins, is first rate. But above all, the musical, so often seen before, feels entirely fresh.

Sher’s My Fair Lady is actually more faithful to George Bernard Shaw’s original concept of his play, Pygmalion, upon which the musical is based, than any production before, including the famous movie with Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. At the very end of the show, Eliza Doolittle, the cockney flower-seller instructed in how to be an upper-class lady by Henry Higgins, the gentleman scholar, proudly walks away from her self-centered control freak of a teacher. Even as Higgins persists in asking her for his slippers, she “sweeps out,” as Shaw had directed, to claim her independence.

Ambrose’s spirited Eliza might seem like an anachronism, tailored to an audience suffused with #MeToo sentiments. And Hadden-Paton’s Higgins might be seen as a typical “mansplainer” who just doesn’t get how times have changed. But Ambrose comes much closer to Shaw’s Eliza than Hepburn, or any of her predecessors in the role.

Shaw’s ideal of female emancipation was, in fact, sabotaged from the very beginning. In the first London production in 1914, to the disgust of the author, Herbert Beerbohm Tree playing Higgins gives Eliza (Mrs. Stella Patrick Campbell) a loving look, intimating a happy life together. When the movie of Pygmalion, starring Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller, was made in 1938, the Hollywood producers insisted on a romantic ending, too. And a similar dose of sugar was sprinkled on the conclusion of the Harrison-Hepburn film.

Like the musical, Shaw’s play, too, was based on an older story, the Greek myth about Galatea, the milk-white beauty sculpted by Pygmalion of Cyprus. After carving his perfect woman out of ivory, he falls in love with her. Answering his prayers, Aphrodite gives her life, and the artist and his feminine ideal live as man and wife. This is a story that could signify many things, but one of the themes is artistic obsession, about a man who only has eyes for his own creation.

Shaw’s main interest, on the other hand, was in class and the role of language in defining social rank in Britain. The art of Henry Higgins, as obsessed as the Greek Pygmalion, is to place people by their accents with absolute precision. He can tell by any given English accent not only in which town someone is born, but exactly where in that town. And naturally, he can detect every shade of social class. When he hears Eliza for the first time, selling flowers in Covent Garden, he can even tell which street she grew up in. His loyal companion, Colonel Pickering, played in the current production by Allan Corduner, is immediately pinned down to his school, university, and last place of residence: Harrow, Cambridge, and India.

This is something of a joke, of course, but only up to a point. Until quite recently, and perhaps to some extent still, British people were cursed or privileged by their class. The right or wrong accent, like the right shoes or the wrong tie, could determine a person’s life. Language shaped one’s identity.

That Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, two of the greatest theatrical satirists of British class, were both Irish is surely no coincidence. They had the acid eyes of born outsiders. Wilde was a libertarian dandy, who ridiculed British conventions. Shaw was a fierce critic of class snobbery, and a defender of women’s rights at a time when women didn’t even have the right to vote.

Higgins, too, in all his incarnations, including Hadden-Paton’s, is a nonconformist of a kind, and rather like Pygmalion, an artist in love with his own creations. His sculpture, as it were, of the ideal woman is thus Eliza. But he also talks a great deal about the human soul, even as he refuses to recognize one in Eliza.

One of the most moving scenes, in the movies, as well as in the current production, is the private celebration after the ball, where Eliza manages to pass for the first time as a grand lady. Higgins is toasted by all his servants: “Congratulations, Professor Higgins, for your glorious victory.” And Pickering sings:

You did it! You did it! You did it!
They thought she was ecstatic
And so damned Aristocratic,
And they never knew that you did it!

All the while, Eliza sits in a corner, utterly ignored, as though she had played no active part in her transformation from a flower girl to a lady, as though she were nothing but Higgins’s artifact. This is also the moment of her rebellion. She throws a fit and pelts Higgins with his precious slippers.

The question is what happens to the human soul when social identity changes. Eliza speaks a new language and has a new set of manners, to match her new jewels and clothes. That Cecil Beaton, who designed the clothes and the sets for the movie of My Fair Lady, will forever be associated with the musical is entirely justified, for the look tells the story. The ladies are so tightly cocooned in their extravagant and fanciful gowns that they appear to be imprisoned in them; evening dress as a kind of bondage.

But who is Eliza now? Where is her soul? Like Pygmalion, though with much less ardor, Higgins falls in love with her, as he thinks: “I’ve grown accustomed to her face.” But it is not her soul that he loves, but only the well-spoken, beautifully dressed, fine-mannered figure that he shaped.

To end the play, or film, or musical, with the artist and his creation falling into romantic bliss is indeed a betrayal of Shaw’s intentions. For to be free, in the way Shaw wanted women to be free, Eliza has to break with Higgins. And Higgins is too much of an artist to be content with being tied down in a conventional marriage anyway. His famous song, “I’m an Ordinary Man,” in which he advises, “Let a woman in your life, and you invite eternal strife,” may sound like the expression of a typical male chauvinist. And in a way, that is just what it is. But it is also the sentiment of a man who can only live for his work.

And so, they must part ways. Shaw actually wrote an alternative ending for the movie with Leslie Howard. In that version, which the producers rejected, Eliza marries the penniless upper-class twit Freddy Eynsford-Hill, and runs her own flower shop. This, too, seems unsatisfactory. It is much better to turn around and walk away, as Lauren Ambrose does with such panache.

My Fair Lady, directed by Bartlett Sher (book by Alan Jay Lerner; music by Frederick Loewe), is at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, New York, through January 2019.

The post Doolittle Done Well appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Nobuyoshi Araki and Nan Goldin are good friends. This is not surprising, since the seventy-seven-year-old Japanese photographer and the younger American are engaged in something similar: they make an art out of chronicling their lives in photographs, aiming at a raw kind of authenticity, which often involves sexual practices outside the conventional bounds of respectability. Araki spent a lot of time with the prostitutes, masseuses, and “adult” models of the Tokyo demi-monde, while Goldin made her name with pictures of her gay and trans friends in downtown Manhattan.

Of the two, Goldin exposes herself more boldly (one of her most famous images is of her own battered face after a beating by her lover). Araki did take some very personal photographs, currently displayed in an exhibition at New York City’s Museum of Sex, of his wife Yoko during their honeymoon in 1971, including pictures of them having sex, and of her death from cancer less than twenty years later. But this work is exceptional—perhaps the most moving he ever made—and the kind of self-exposure seen in Goldin’s harrowing self-portrait is largely absent from Araki’s art.

Araki is not, however, shy about his sexual predilections, recorded in thousands of pictures of naked women tied up in ropes, or spreading their legs, or writhing on hotel beds. A number of photographs, also in the current exhibition, of a long-term lover named Kaori show her in various nude poses, over which Araki has splashed paint meant to evoke jets of sperm. Araki proudly talks about having sex with most of his models. He likes breaking down the border between himself and his subjects, and sometimes will hand the camera to one of his models and become a subject himself. But whenever he appears in a photograph, he is posing, mugging, or (in one typical example in the show) holding a beer bottle between his thighs, while pretending to have an orgasm.

If this is authenticity, it is a stylized, theatrical form of authenticity. His mode is not confessional in the way Goldin’s is. Araki is not interested in showing his most intimate feelings. He is a showman as much as a photographer. His round face, fluffy hair, odd spectacles, T-shirts, and colored suspenders, instantly recognizable in Japan, are now part of his brand, which he promotes in published diaries and endless interviews. Since Araki claims to do little else but take pictures, from the moment he gets up in the morning till he falls asleep at night, the pictures are records of his life. But that life looks as staged as many of his photographs.

Although Araki has published hundreds of books, he is not a versatile photographer. He really has only two main subjects: Tokyo, his native city, and sex. Some of his Tokyo pictures are beautiful, even poetic. A few are on display in the Museum of Sex: a moody black-and-white view of the urban landscape at twilight, a few street scenes revealing his nostalgia for the city of his childhood, which has almost entirely disappeared.

But it is his other obsession that is mainly on show in New York. It might seem a bit of a comedown for a world-famous photographer to have an exhibition at a museum that caters mostly to the prurient end of the tourist trade, especially after having had major shows at the Musée Guimet in Paris and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. But Araki is the least snobbish of artists. The distinctions between high and low culture, or art and commerce, do not much interest him. In Japan, he has published pictures in some quite raunchy magazines.

The only tacky aspect of an otherwise well-curated, sophisticated exhibition is the entrance: a dark corridor decorated with a kind of spider web of ropes that would be more appropriate in a seedy sex club. I could have done without the piped-in music, too.

Sex is, of course, an endlessly fascinating subject. Araki’s obsessive quest for the mysteries of erotic desire, not only expressed in his photographs of nudes, but also in lubricious close-ups of flowers and fruits, could be seen as a lust for life and defiance of death. Some of these pictures are beautifully composed and printed, and some are rough and scattershot. One wall is covered in Polaroid photos, rather like Andy Warhol’s pictures of his friends and models, except that Araki’s show a compulsive interest in female anatomy.

Genitalia, as the source of life, are literally objects of worship in many Japanese Shinto shrines. But there is something melancholy about a number of Araki’s nudes; something frozen, almost corpse-like about the women trussed up in ropes staring at the camera with expressionless faces. The waxen face of his wife Yoko in her casket comes to mind. Then there are those odd plastic models of lizards and dinosaurs that Araki likes to place on the naked bodies of women in his pictures, adding another touch of morbidity.

Private Collection

Nobuyoshi Araki: Komari from “L’Amant d’août” (“Suicide in Tokyo”), 2002

Private Collection

Nobuyoshi Araki: Kinbaku (Bondage), 1979

Private Collection

Nobuyoshi Araki: Tokyo Comedy, 1997

Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo

Nobuyoshi Araki: Winter Journey, 1989–1990/2005

But to criticize Araki’s photos—naked women pissing into umbrellas at a live sex show, women with flowers stuck into their vaginas, women in schoolgirl uniforms suspended in bondage, and so on—for being pornographic, vulgar, or obscene, is rather to miss the point. When the filmmaker Nagisa Oshima was prosecuted in the 1970s for obscenity after stills from his erotic masterpiece, In the Realm of the Senses, were published, his defense was: “So, what’s wrong with obscenity?”

The point of Oshima’s movie, and of Araki’s pictures, is a refusal to be constrained by rules of social respectability or good taste when it comes to sexual passion. Oshima’s aim was to see whether he could make an art film out of hardcore porn. Araki doesn’t make such high-flown claims for his work. To him, the photos are an extension of his life. Since much of life is about seeking erotic satisfaction, his pictures reflect that.

Displayed alongside Araki’s photographs at the Museum of Sex are a few examples of Shunga, the erotic woodcuts popular in Edo Period Japan (1603–1868), pictures of courtesans and their clients having sex in various ways, usually displaying huge penises penetrating capacious vulvas. These, too, have something to do with the fertility cults of Shinto, but they were also an expression of artistic rebellion. Political protest against the highly authoritarian Shoguns was far too dangerous. The alternative was to challenge social taboos. Occasionally, government officials would demonstrate their authority by cracking down on erotica. They still do. Araki has been prosecuted for obscenity at least once.

One response to Araki’s work, especially in the West, and especially in our time, is to accuse him of “objectifying” women. In the strict sense that women, often in a state of undress, striking sexual poses, are the focus of his, and our, gaze, this is true. (Lest one assume that the gaze is always male, I was interested to note that most of the viewers at the Museum of Sex during my visit were young women.) But Araki maintains that his photographs are a collaborative project. As in any consensual sado-masochistic game, this requires a great deal of trust.

Some years ago, I saw an Araki show in Tokyo. Susan Sontag, who was also there, expressed her shock that young women would agree to being “degraded” in Araki’s pictures. Whereupon the photographer Annie Leibovitz, who was there too, said that women were probably lining up to be photographed by him. Interviews with Araki’s models, some of which are on view at the Museum of Sex, suggest that this is true. Several women talk about feeling liberated, even loved, by the experience of sitting for Araki. One spoke of his intensity as a divine gift. It is certainly true that when Araki advertised for ordinary housewives to be photographed in his usual fashion, there was no shortage of volunteers. Several books came from these sessions. 

But not all his muses have turned out to be so contented, at least in retrospect.

Earlier this year, Kaori wrote in a blog post that she felt exploited by him over the years (separately, in 2017 a model accused Araki of inappropriate contact during a shoot that took place in 1990). Araki exhibited Kaori’s photos without telling her or giving her any credit. On one occasion, she was told to pose naked while he photographed her in front of foreign visitors. When she complained at the time, he told her, probably accurately, that the visitors had not come to see her, but to see him taking pictures. (The Museum of Sex has announced that Kaori’s statement will be incorporated into the exhibition’s wall text.)

These stories ring true. It is the way things frequently are in Japan, not only in relations between artists and models. Contracts are often shunned. Borderlines between personal favors and professional work are blurred. It is entirely possible that Araki behaved badly toward Kaori, and maybe to others, too. Artists often use their muses to excite their imaginations, and treat them shabbily once the erotic rush wears off.

One might wish that Araki had not been the self-absorbed obsessive he probably is. Very often in art and literature, it is best to separate the private person from the work. Even egotistical bastards, after all, can show tenderness in their art. But in Araki’s case, the distinction is harder to maintain—this is an artist who insists on his life being inseparable from his pictures. The life has dark sides, and his lechery might in contemporary terms be deemed inappropriate, but that is precisely what makes his art so interesting. Araki’s erotomania is what drives him: aside from the posing and self-promotion, it is the one thing that can be called absolutely authentic.

Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo

Nobuyoshi Araki: Erotos, 2013

Private Collection

Nobuyoshi Araki: Flowers, 1985

“The Incomplete Araki: Sex, Life, and Death in the Works of Nobuyoshi Araki” is at the Museum of Sex, New York, through August 31.

The post Araki, Erotomaniac appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

V.S. Naipaul’s fastidiousness was legendary. I met him for the first time in Berlin, in 1991, when he was feted for the German edition of his latest book. A smiling young waitress offered him some decent white wine. Naipaul took the bottle from her hand, examined the label for some time, like a fine-art dealer inspecting a dubious piece, handed the bottle back, and said with considerable disdain: “I think perhaps later, perhaps later.” (Naipaul often repeated phrases.)

This kind of thing also found its way into his travel writing. He could work himself up into a rage about the quality of the towels in his hotel bathroom, or the slack service on an airline, or the poor food at a restaurant, as though these were personal affronts to him, the impeccably turned-out traveler.

Naipaul was nothing if not self-aware. In his first travel account of India, An Area of Darkness (1964), he describes a visit to his ancestral village in a poor, dusty part of Uttar Pradesh, where an old woman clutches Naipaul’s shiny English shoes. Naipaul feels overwhelmed, alienated, presumed upon. He wants to leave this remote place his grandfather left behind many years before. A young man wishes to hitch a ride to the nearest town. Naipaul says: “No, let the idler walk.” And so, he adds, “the visit ended, in futility and impatience, a gratuitous act of cruelty, self-reproach and flight.”

It is tempting to see Naipaul as a blimpish figure, aping the manners of British bigots; or as a fussy Brahmin, unwilling to eat from the same plates as lower castes. Both views miss the mark. Naipaul’s fastidiousness had more to do with what he called the “raw nerves” of a displaced colonial, a man born in a provincial outpost of empire, who had struggled against the indignities of racial prejudice to make his mark, to be a writer, to add his voice to what he saw as a universal civilization. Dirty towels, bad service, and the wretchedness of his ancestral land were insults to his sense of dignity, of having overcome so much.

These raw nerves did not make him into an apologist for empire, let alone for the horrors inflicted by white Europeans. On the contrary, he blamed the abject state of so many former colonies on imperial conquest. In The Loss of Eldorado (1969), a short history of his native Trinidad, he describes in great detail how waves of bloody conquest wiped out entire peoples and their cultures, leaving half-baked, dispossessed, rootless societies. Such societies have lost what Naipaul calls their “wholeness” and are prone to revolutionary fantasies and religious fanaticism.

Wholeness was an important idea to Naipaul. To him, it represented cultural memory, a settled sense of place and identity. History was important to him, as well as literary achievement upon which new generations of writers could build. It irked him that there was nothing for him to build on in Trinidad, apart from some vaguely recalled Brahmin rituals and books about a faraway European country where it rained all the time, a place he could only imagine. England, to him, represented a culture that was whole. And, from the distance of his childhood, so did India. (In fact, he knew more about ancient Rome, taught by a Latin teacher in Trinidad, than he did about either country.)

When he finally managed to go to India, he was disappointed. India was a “wounded civilization,” maimed by Muslim conquests and European colonialism. He realized he didn’t belong there, any more than in Trinidad or in England. And so he sought to find his place in the world through words. Books would be his escape from feeling rootless and superfluous. His father, Seepersad Naipaul, had tried to lift himself from his surroundings by writing journalism and short stories, which he hoped, in vain, to publish in England. Writing, to father and son, was more than a profession; it was a calling that conferred a kind of nobility.

Naipaul’s most famous novel, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), drew on the father’s story of frustrated ambition. By going back into the world of his childhood, he found the words to create his own link to that universal literary civilization. He often told interviewers that he only existed in his books.

If raw nerves made him irascible at times, they also sharpened his vision. He understood people who were culturally dislocated and who tried to find solace in religious or political fantasies that were often borrowed from other places and ineptly mimicked. He described such delusions precisely and often comically. His sense of humor sometimes bordered on cruelty, and in interviews with liberal journalists it could take the form of calculated provocation. But his refusal to sentimentalize the wounds in postcolonial societies produced some of his most penetrating insights.

My favorite book by Naipaul is not A House for Mr. Biswas, or the later novel A Bend in the River (1979), his various books on India, or even his 1987 masterpiece The Enigma of Arrival, but a slender volume entitled Finding the Center (1984). It consists of two long essays, one about how he learned to become a writer, how he found his own voice, and the other about a trip to Ivory Coast in 1982. In the first piece, written out of unflinching self-knowledge, he gives a lucid account of the way he sees the world, and how he puts this in words. He travels to understand himself, as well as the politics and histories of the countries he visits. Following random encounters with people who interest him, he tries to understand how people see themselves in relation to the world they live in. But by doing so, he finds his own place, too, in his own inimitable words.

The second part of Finding the Center, called “The Crocodiles of Yamassoukro,” is a perfect example of his methods. It is a surprisingly sympathetic account of a messed-up African country, filled with foreigners as well as local people wrapped up in a variety of self-told stories, some of them fantastical, about how they see themselves fitting in. African Americans come in search of an imaginary Africa. A black woman from Martinique escapes in a private world of quasi-French snobbery. And the Africans themselves, in Naipaul’s vision, have held onto a “whole” culture under a thin layer of false mimicry. This culture of ancestral spirits comes alive at night, when the gimcrack modernity of daily urban life is forgotten.

Being in Africa reminds him of his childhood in Trinidad, when descendants of slaves turned the world upside down in carnivals, in which the oppressive white world ceased to exist and they reigned as African kings and queens. It is an oddly romantic vision of African life, this idea that something whole lurks under the surface of a half-made, borrowed civilization. Perhaps it is more telling of Naipaul’s own longings than of the reality of most people’s lives. If he is always clear-eyed about the pretentions of religious fanatics, Third World mimic men, and delusional political figures, his idea of wholeness can sound almost sentimental.

I remember being in a car with Naipaul one summer day in Wiltshire, England, near the cottage where he lived. He told me about his driver, a local man. The driver, he said, had a special bond with the rolling hills we were passing through. The man was aware of his ancestors buried under our feet. He belonged here. He felt the link with generations that had been here before him: “That is how he thinks, that is how he thinks.”

I am not convinced at all that this was the way Naipaul’s driver thought. But it was certainly the way he thought in the writer’s imagination. Naipaul was our greatest poet of the half-baked and the displaced. It was the imaginary wholeness of civilizations that sometimes led him astray. He became too sympathetic to the Hindu nationalism that is now poisoning India politics, as if a whole Hindu civilization were on the rise after centuries of alien Muslim or Western despoliations.

There is no such thing as a whole civilization. But some of Naipaul’s greatest literature came out of his yearning for it. Although he may, at times, have associated this with England or India, his imaginary civilization was not tied to any nation. It was a literary idea, secular, enlightened, passed on through writing. That is where he made his home, and that is where, in his books, he will live on.

The post V.S. Naipaul, Poet of the Displaced appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

V.S. Naipaul’s fastidiousness was legendary. I met him for the first time in Berlin in 1991, when he was being feted for the German edition of his latest book. A smiling young waitress offered him some decent white wine. Naipaul took the bottle from her hand, examined the label for some time, like a fine art dealer inspecting a dubious piece, handed the bottle back, and said with considerable disdain: “I think perhaps later, perhaps later.” (Naipaul often repeated phrases.) This kind of thing also found its way into his travel writing. He could work up a rage about the quality of the towels in his hotel bathroom, or the slack service on an airline, or the poor food at a restaurant, as though these were personal affronts to him, the impeccably turned-out traveler.

Naipaul was nothing if not self-aware. In his first travel account of India, An Area of Darkness, he describes a visit to his ancestral village in a poor, dusty part of Uttar Pradesh, where an old woman clutches his shiny English shoes. Naipaul feels overwhelmed, alienated, presumed upon. He wants to leave this remote place his grandfather left behind many years before. A young man asks for a ride to the nearest town. Naipaul says: “No. Let the idler walk.” And so, he adds, the visit “ended, in futility and impatience, a gratuitous act of cruelty, self-reproach and flight.”

It is tempting to see Naipaul as a blimpish figure, aping the manners of British bigots; or as a fussy Brahmin, unwilling to eat from the same plates as lower castes. Both views miss the mark. Naipaul’s fastidiousness had more to do with what he called the “raw nerves” of a displaced colonial, a man born in a provincial outpost of empire, who had struggled against the indignities of racial prejudice to make his mark, to be a writer, to add his voice to what he saw as a universal civilization. Dirty towels, bad service, and the wretchedness of his ancestral land were insults to his sense of dignity, of having overcome so much.

These raw nerves did not make him into an apologist for empire, let alone for the horrors inflicted by white Europeans. On the contrary, he blamed the abject state of so many former colonies on imperial conquest. In The Loss of El Dorado, a short history of his native Trinidad, he describes in great detail how waves of bloody conquest wiped out entire peoples and their cultures, leaving half-baked, dispossessed, rootless societies. Such societies have lost what Naipaul calls their “wholeness” and are prone to revolutionary fantasies and religious fanaticism.

Wholeness was an important idea to Naipaul. To him, it represented cultural memory, a settled sense of place and identity. History was important to him, as well as literary achievement upon which new generations of writers could build. It irked him that there was nothing for him to build on in Trinidad, apart from some vaguely recalled Brahmin rituals and books about a faraway European country where it rained all the time, a place he could only imagine. England, to him, represented a culture that was whole. And from the distance of his childhood, so did India. (In fact, he knew more about ancient Rome, taught by a Latin teacher in Trinidad, than he did about either country.)

When he finally managed to go to India, he was disappointed. India was a “wounded civilization,” maimed by Muslim conquests and European colonialism. He realized he didn’t belong there, any more than in Trinidad or England. And so he sought to find his place in the world through words. Books would be his escape from feeling rootless and superfluous. His father, Seepersad Naipaul, had tried to lift himself from his surroundings by writing journalism and short stories, which he hoped in vain to publish in England. Writing, to father and son, was more than a profession; it was a calling that conferred a kind of nobility.

Naipaul’s most famous novel, A House for Mr. Biswas, drew on the father’s story of frustrated ambition. By returning to the world of his childhood, Naipaul found the words to create his own link to that universal literary civilization. He often told interviewers that he only existed in his books.

If raw nerves made him irascible at times, they also sharpened his vision. He understood people who were culturally dislocated and tried to find solace in religious or political fantasies that were often borrowed from other places and ineptly mimicked. He described such delusions precisely and often comically. His sense of humor sometimes bordered on cruelty, and in interviews with liberal journalists could take the form of calculated provocation. But his refusal to sentimentalize the wounds in postcolonial societies produced some of his most penetrating insights.

My favorite book by Naipaul is not A House for Mr. Biswas or A Bend in the River, his various books on India, or even his masterpiece, The Enigma of Arrival, but a slender volume entitled Finding the Center. It consists of two long essays, one about how he learned to become a writer, how he found his voice, and the other about a trip to Ivory Coast in 1982. In the first piece, written out of unflinching self-knowledge, he gives a lucid account of the way he sees the world and how he puts this into words. He travels to understand himself, as well as the politics and histories of the countries he visits. Following random encounters with people who interest him, he tries to understand how they see themselves in relation to the world they live in. But by doing so, he finds his own place too, in his own inimitable words.

The second part of Finding the Center, called “Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro,” is a perfect example of his methods. It is a surprisingly sympathetic account of a messed-up African country, filled with foreigners as well as local people wrapped up in a variety of self-told stories, some of them fantastical, of how they see themselves fitting in. African-Americans come in search of an imaginary Africa. A black woman from Martinique escapes into a private world of quasi-French snobbery. And the Africans themselves, in Naipaul’s vision, have held on to a “whole” culture under a thin layer of false imitation. This culture of ancestral spirits comes alive at night, when the gimcrack modernity of daily urban life is forgotten.

Being in Africa reminds him of his childhood in Trinidad, when descendants of slaves turned the world upside down in carnivals, in which the oppressive white world ceased to exist and they reigned as African kings and queens. It is an oddly romantic vision of African life, this idea that something whole lurks under the surface of a half-made, borrowed civilization. Perhaps it is more telling of Naipaul’s own longings than of the reality of most people’s lives. If he is always clear-eyed about the pretensions of religious fanatics, third-world mimic men, and delusional political figures, his idea of wholeness can sound almost sentimental.

I remember being in a car with Naipaul one summer day in Wiltshire, near the cottage where he lived. He told me about his driver, a local man. The driver, he said, had a special bond with the rolling hills we were passing through. He was aware of his ancestors buried under our feet. He belonged here. He felt the link with generations that had been here before him: “That is how he thinks, that is how he thinks.”

I was not convinced at all that this was the way Naipaul’s driver thought. But it was certainly the way he thought in the writer’s imagination. Naipaul was our greatest poet of the half-baked and the displaced. It was the imaginary wholeness of civilizations that sometimes led him astray. He became too sympathetic to the Hindu nationalism that is now poisoning Indian politics, as if a whole Hindu civilization were on the rise after centuries of alien Muslim or Western despoliations.

There is no such thing as a whole civilization. But some of Naipaul’s greatest literature came out of his yearning for it. Although he may, at times, have associated this with England or India, his imaginary civilization was not tied to any nation. It was a literary idea, secular, enlightened, passed on through writing. That is where he made his home, and that is where, in his books, he will live on.

The post V.S. Naipaul (1932–2018) appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

On Hyde Park Corner in London, facing the Duke of Wellington’s old house, where one can still see a giant sculpture of a fully nude Napoleon towering over the hall, stands a curious monument known as the Royal Artillery Memorial. A huge sculpted model of a Howitzer gun points to the sky on top of a Portland stone plinth. Around this phallic symbol of deadly force, designed in the early 1920s by Charles Sargeant Jagger and Lionel Pearson, stand a couple of bronze soldiers. And on one side lies a dead artilleryman covered by his greatcoat. The text engraved in the stone under this fallen soldier reads: “Here was a royal fellowship of death.”

The monument commemorates the 49,076 men of the Royal Regiment of Artillery who died in World War I. There has been much controversy over it ever since it was unveiled in 1925. Some of the criticism concerns the questionable taste of paying such monumental tribute to a Howitzer. It might be construed as a crude example of militarism.

In fact, however, the problems some people have had with it, especially in the years soon after the catastrophic war, were about something else. Jagger, a veteran of Gallipoli and the Western Front, wanted to inject a note of realism into his sculptures; the bronze soldiers are not idealized in any way. They look weary, hardened by bitter experience, almost dazed, like those soldiers staring at nothing in the famous Vietnam War photographs by David Douglas Duncan. And then there is the dead man under his coat.

This was not the usual way the Great War was remembered officially in Britain, Germany, or France. Abstractions—tombs of the unknown soldier and the like—were favored, or classical allegories, especially popular in Germany, of soldiers as nude Greek heroes holding up swords, or Christ-like figures expressing the beauty of sacrificial death. One of Jagger’s soldiers, leaning back with outstretched arms, could be likened to a Christ figure, but he still looks far more real than people, or at least military and civilian officials at the time, would have wished for. What the monument shows, despite the Howitzer, is not military valor, but the pathos of war.

The Royal Artillery Memorial is one of the works featured in “Aftermath,” the Tate Britain exhibition comparing the impact of the Great War on artists in Germany, Britain, and France. Of the three nations, France is least represented. The really interesting differences are between German and British artists.

As far as war memorials are concerned, Germany too had its controversies. Official monuments tended to be abstract, heroic, and focused on the sacrifice of young blood for the nation. But one of the most beautiful sculptures commemorating the war is Der Schwebende (The Floating One), by the Expressionist artist Ernst Barlach. A war veteran like Jagger, Barlach went for the antiheroic. The floating figure is an angel with hands folded on her chest and the haunted face of a mother grieving over her sons. (The face was actually modeled after the sad countenance of the artist Käthe Kollwitz, whose younger son died in the war.) The melancholy angel was suspended from the ceiling of a cathedral in eastern Germany in 1927, then removed by the Nazis ten years later as “degenerate art” and melted down to manufacture gun shells. (The one displayed at the Tate is cast from a copy.)

The tension between celebrating the heroic and lamenting the horrors of war was especially strong in Germany. In Britain and France, victory could make up for, or disguise, or at least mitigate the sense of loss. And everything was done to encourage this. In 1919, the British government commissioned William Orpen to do a painting in memory of the Paris Peace Conference. The original idea was to show a tomb of the unknown British soldier set in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles amid the proud figures of various Allied generals and field marshals. Instead, Orpen, who disliked the military brass, decided to paint two emaciated, half-dead ordinary soldiers flanking the tomb of their unknown comrade. The Ministry of Information refused to exhibit the painting. Only once Orpen had erased these awful specters of war was the painting finally displayed at the Imperial War Museum in London.

During the war, too, there was great official resistance to depicting anything approaching the reality of battle. One of the best British war artists, C.R.W. Nevinson, did an oil painting in 1917 entitled Paths of Glory. It shows two soldiers lying dead in the mud in front of the barbed wire of a trench they were perhaps ordered to make a dash for. The real thing undoubtedly would have looked much worse. But the picture was still banned by the military censor. A year later, Nevinson showed it anyway, covered with brown paper inscribed with the word “censored.”

National differences become particularly clear in the depiction of maimed soldiers. Thousands of men in all three countries had half their faces blown off, or had missing limbs, or were horribly disfigured by mustard gas attacks. In France, these men often appeared in public events celebrating the victory and were shown in photographs to remind people of the suffering of common soldiers. This did not happen in Britain. There is a famous series of portraits by Henry Tonks, displayed at the Tate, of men with mutilated faces, but at the time these were only used for medical purposes. It was left to German artists to produce the most gruesome images of battlefield carnage. A famous example is the series of etchings made in 1923–1924 by Otto Dix, entitled The War: rotting corpses in waterlogged trenches, skulls filled with maggots and worms, faces that are barely recognizable as human.

Inspired by Goya’s prints of wartime atrocities, Dix did these prints from memory; he had been a machine gunner on some of the worst battlefields. Whereas Tonks’s drawings were initially only seen by doctors, Dix’s etchings were published as folios and widely shown. Even the techniques of the two artists tell a story. The drawings by Tonks are in pastel colors, not so different in tone from the landscapes by genteel English watercolorists. The monochrome pictures by Dix are dark and aggressive, as though etched in a fury. Dorothy Price writes in her essay for the exhibition catalog:

Many scholars have observed how the corrosive processes involved in the etching technique, in which large holes can be bored into the plate by acid, mimics the expressive potential of Dix’s subject matter.

There is nothing like this in British or even French art. There are French paintings of ruined landscapes, like André Masson’s ochre oil painting La route de Picardie (1924), and pictures of barbed wire, trenches, and bomb craters by British war artists like Orpen, Nevinson, and Paul Nash. Some are very good: Wire (1918–1919), by Nash, for example, gives a vivid impression of the ruined landscape in Flanders or northern France. But the atmosphere is melancholic. These artists, some of whom had witnessed the same shocking scenes as Dix, lacked the ferocity of German artists.

One of the most interesting British painters of the period was Stanley Spencer. Like Nevinson, he had served in an ambulance unit on several fronts. And like so many artists of his generation all over Europe, he was marked by the war forever. But far from glorifying manly action or wallowing in the gore, Spencer related to the dead in an intimate and gently spiritual way. Dead soldiers and horses rise from their battlefield graves in The Resurrection of the Soldiers (1929). In a painting from 1922, Unveiling Cookham War Memorial, villagers in Cookham, where Spencer lived, mourn their kin as the War Memorial is unveiled (see illustration on page 84). But there is no rage in these pictures, just sadness, Christian faith, and a certain air of whimsy; while some mourners look distressed, others in their striped blazers and white ducks lounge on the sun-dappled lawn. The dead are recalled in a country at peace.

This was far from being the case in Germany, a nation that was morally unhinged and torn apart by violent revolutionaries and roaming war veterans lusting for revenge. Compare Stanley Spencer’s Christ Carrying the Cross (1920) with Albert Birkle’s Cross Shouldering (Friedrichstrasse) (1924). Spencer’s Christ can barely be seen as he passes by a very English house in the High Street of Cookham, surrounded by clerics and ordinary folks, looking like angels in the moonlight. Gentle Cookham is a long way from turbulent Berlin, where the torment of Birkle’s emaciated Christ is observed with a mixture of amusement and contempt by hard-faced men and women who, in a different setting, could be among the typical crowd at a lynching. What is missing in Spencer’s art, and that of most of his peers in Britain, is the menacing air of violence.

The historian George L. Mosse, who escaped from Nazi persecution in Germany as a young man, argued that German life was brutalized by the militarism of World War I. People had become inured to death and cruelty. Men tested by the fire and steel of battle were exalted by nationalist writers such as Ernst Jünger. War veterans felt emasculated, humiliated, and useless in peacetime. Only the camaraderie of collective violence would revive their spirits. Mosse wrote in his book Fallen Soldiers, “War itself had been the great brutalizer, not merely through the experience of combat at the front, but also through the wartime relationships between officers and men, and among the men themselves.”¹

This may have been true. But why wouldn’t such relationships—and such experience—have had a similar effect on British and French men? The difference must lie in the outcome of the war. Mosse also wrote:

England and France, the victorious nations, where the transition from war to peace had been relatively smooth, were able to keep the process of brutalization largely, if not entirely, under control. Those nations like Germany which were not so fortunate saw a new ruthlessness invade their politics.

In other words, it was not so much war itself that brutalized German politics as the much rockier transition to peace. The humiliation of losing the war no doubt had something to do with this. It is harder for defeated soldiers to adapt to civilian life than victorious ones. But the militarization of German life had begun well before the war. Kaiser Wilhelm II was already spouting a lot of the belligerent and anti-Semitic rhetoric that was later taken up by the Nazis. And the contempt for democratic politics, both on the left and the right, was much greater in Germany than in Britain or France. Certainly the consequences of wartime defeat were more devastating in Germany: the economic dislocation, the moral collapse, and the harsh conditions in German cities where men and women would do anything to scrape by. No wonder that the prostitute became one of the main symbols of Weimar Period culture, especially in the visual arts.

Like the maimed veterans, war profiteers were a conspicuous presence in all the nations at war. They, too, found their way into paintings. But consider the difference between Nevinson’s portrait of such a figure in He Gained a Fortune but He Gave a Son (1918), and Heinrich Maria Davringhausen’s The Profiteer (1920–1921). Superficially, the two men look remarkably alike: well fed, self-satisfied, thin-lipped, beady-eyed. But on the mantelpiece behind Nevinson’s profiteer is a photograph of his son, who died in the war that made his father rich. The painting is ambiguous, both slightly repellent and sad. Davringhausen’s figure, sitting in a sterile ultra-modern office with a smoldering cigar at his elbow and a glass of wine on his desk, is more threatening; not quite the fat-necked brute you see in pictures by George Grosz, but still swinish enough.

Grosz’s graffiti-like caricatures of life in Weimar Germany express a kind of voluptuous loathing for the dislocated society of postwar Berlin. Men are either wrecks of war, begging in the streets on crutches, ignored by well-dressed passersby, or they are lecherous pigs, obese cigar-chomping bosses, or uniformed thugs. Grosz wrote in 1922:

People have created a rotten system—with a top and a bottom. A handful of them earn millions, while untold thousands have barely enough to exist on…. My task is to show the oppressed the true faces of their masters. Man is not good; he is like cattle.

Bertolt Brecht could not have expressed it better.

What gives so many drawings by Grosz their louche allure is that he reveled in the rottenness he professed to hate. The streets of Berlin, with their cripples and whores and pimps and plutocrats, provided the inspiration for his best art. The British artist who was most clearly influenced by Grosz was the marvelous Edward Burra. He, too, loved painting shady dancing halls, lesbian bars, hookers, and other lowlife characters (not just in London but in Paris, Mexico, and Harlem). His art can be as lurid as Grosz’s Berlin pictures: the strutting prostitute in her pink finery in Saturday Market (1932) or the goons ogling a naked dancer in Striptease (Harlem) (1934). What is missing is the loathing. Burra doesn’t hate; he is fascinated, amused, and invigorated by the seamy vitality of urban life.

Grosz, together with such artists as John Heartfield and Hannah Höch, was part of the Dada movement, a nihilistic, absurdist artistic reaction to the supposedly rational world that produced the slaughter of World War I. Originating in Switzerland during the war, Dada spawned groups in Paris and New York, as well as in Berlin. Parisian Dadaists, led by such figures as André Breton and Tristan Tzara, scandalized people with zany theater performances, ballets, and manifestos. But the scandals were more artistic than political, and often injected with doses of mad humor. French Dada was a major influence on Surrealism.

German Dada was more aggressively political. In the words of Grosz:

If [Dada] expressed anything at all, it was our long fermenting restlessness, discontent and sarcasm. Any national defeat, any change to a new era gives birth to that sort of movement. At a different time in history we might just as well have been flagellants.²

Collage was a favorite Dada form—fragmented images patched together that made no logical sense or were deliberately provocative, such as John Heartfield’s Fathers and Sons (1924), showing Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg with uniformed children and skeletons marching in the background. Heartfield and Grosz also made a grotesque human figure out of a tailor’s dummy, with a prosthetic leg and a light bulb for a head. It was called The Petit-Bourgeois Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild (1920).

Kurt Schwitters was one of the main practitioners of this type of art. He coined the nonsensical word Merz for his collages, sculptures (Merzplastik), and interior designs (Merzbau). The idea was to assemble works from the most disparate sources—he built a kind of memorial column out of old newspapers, photographs, and figurines, topped with the death mask of his first-born child, who died as a baby in 1916. Schwitters explained Merz as follows: “Everything had broken down…new things had to be made from fragments…new art forms out of the remains of a former culture.”

The other movement that fanned out across the world, all the way to Iowa, where Grant Wood did his strangely detached, slightly eerie paintings, was Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity: reality seen and depicted through unflinching eyes, devoid of sentimentality. This was Otto Dix’s definition: “If you are painting a portrait of someone it is best not to know him. I only want to see what is there, the exterior.”

British artists like Paul Nash painted landscapes from this point of view, with the same hallucinatory realism as Wood. But Grosz, Dix, Max Beckmann, and other German artists added a distinctly political twist. Their sharp eyes took in the worst, most brutal aspects of postwar urban life, to protest the hideous social conditions of their society. Their pictures of sex murders, torture rooms, and rape were labeled “degenerate art” under the Nazis. Hitler favored heroic classicist nudes, sentimental German landscapes, or paintings of wholesome blond German farmers tilling the native soil. The “degenerates” were often sympathetic to the political left, whereas the classicists (think of Arno Breker’s sculptures of muscle-bound Aryan males) are associated with the right.

Things were not quite that simple, however. One of the revelations of a recent show at the Neue Galerie in New York, entitled “Before the Fall,” as well as the catalog of a recent exhibition in Frankfurt, “Splendor and Misery in the Weimar Republic,” was that the German artists of the 1920s and 1930s could not always be so neatly classified. New Objectivity had both a “left” and a “right” component; realism could be a form of social criticism but also an expression of restored order. Even those categories could be quite fluid. Franz Radziwill, for example, was affiliated with New Objectivity, was friendly with Otto Dix in the 1920s, and mixed with the radical left. His paintings of airplanes and battleships, of ruined houses under doom-laden skies, owe something to the Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich, something to the modernist fascination with technology, and something to New Objectivity too.

In 1933, Radziwill joined the Nazi Party and the next year painted Revolution, a morbid image of a dead stormtrooper in front of a kind of ghost house with two hanged men outside. Another painting from that period, The Steel Helmet in No Man’s Land, shows just that: a dead soldier’s cracked helmet in a bleak and broken stretch of land under a beat-up barbed wire fence. It isn’t quite clear what these paintings, done in a spooky magical realism, are supposed to mean, especially since Radziwill repainted parts of them after 1945 to conform to changed times. The hanged men were not in the original painting. And he claimed that the helmet picture was a protest against war, even though in 1933 it was seen as a tribute to patriotic sacrifice.

A more interesting artist than Radziwill was Rudolf Schlichter. His 1924 painting of a weary-looking prostitute named Margot, holding a gold-tipped cigarette, adorns the cover of the splendid catalog of the “Splendor and Misery” exhibition. Schlichter was a typical example of what the Nazis regarded as degenerate: an early Communist, a friend of George Grosz, a Dadaist, a member of the New Objectivity, and a painter of Berlin decadence (he was especially fond of high-heeled women’s boots). But in the late 1920s, he spent more time with right-wing intellectuals like Ernst Jünger, whom he portrayed, joined the Nazi Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, and turned to Catholicism. This didn’t stop the Nazis from confiscating his art. After the war, he became a Surrealist, and is sometimes called the German Salvador Dalí.

By the time Hitler came to power, the extraordinary flowering of German art was over. The democratic decade after World War I in Germany was marked by corruption, violence, and vice, and it produced some of the greatest art of the twentieth century. After 1933, under one of the most brutal regimes in human history, German art was lifeless, mediocre, and sentimental. Some of the more conservative New Objectivity artists, like Georg Schrimpf, were still permitted to show their neo-Romantic landscapes. Dix, whose earlier work was banned and who was fired as an art teacher, resorted to painting dull landscapes and family portraits full of just the kind of sweetness that the New Objectivists had tried so hard to avoid.

I believe it was Jean Genet who once remarked that he no longer had any interest in traveling to Germany after the Nazis took over. Once the state itself, and not an urban underclass, had become the main source of crime, art lost its subversive purpose.

The post Art of a Degenerate World appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Bob Silvers, my friend and the editor of The New York Review, died on March 20, shortly after completing the April 6 issue. Together with Barbara Epstein, Jason Epstein, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Robert Lowell, he founded the Review in 1963; for fifty-four years he was either co-editor with Barbara or, after her death in 2006, editor of the Review. Bob worked almost to the very end of his life, which would be no surprise to those who knew him well, including those who have written these brief memoirs.

—Rea Hederman

ELAINE BLAIR

Until I arrived at the Review as an editorial assistant, I had never met anyone who so rarely engaged in idle pleasantries as Bob. His daily language was pared down, accurate, and sincere. I found his example revelatory, and I would ponder his usage and elisions like a giddy college freshman. Bob would never, for instance, wish us a good weekend. Presumably he had no particular investment in the quality of our weekends, and possibly he didn’t even know when his assistants’ weekends were, since we took turns working Saturday and Sunday shifts with him.

But was he also, I wondered, rejecting the implied value of a good weekend? Is the goal of leisure time pleasure? Edification? Novel experience? If we couldn’t settle on criteria, we couldn’t possibly arrive at a valuation, in which case why bother asking on Monday morning how someone’s weekend had been? The rest of us walked around in a fever of sentimentality and superstition, it suddenly seemed to me, sloppily wishing each other good days and good trips and merriment at Christmas. But Bob said only as much as he meant. When I left the office after a night shift of taking dictation, sending out books, going over a manuscript with him, he said, “Thanks a lot!” And it felt like a lot.

Still, it was hard to get used to a professional relationship that was, by design, largely impersonal. There were four of us assistants and we were supposed to be nearly interchangeable extensions of Bob himself, the extra hands he needed to manage so big a job. Usually only Bob communicated directly with contributors, and when we worked on a manuscript he carefully went over every one of our suggestions or marginal notes. We rarely spoke to him about anything that wasn’t directly relevant to Review pieces. This too seemed to me tied up with Bob’s stringent rejection of linguistic and sentimental cliché, including the commonplaces of workplace relationships. Bob did not take us under his wing. He was not our mentor. He did not believe in us. These were impossibilities because the Review’s lexicon did not allow for them. They may not, in any case, be the best measures of a boss’s generosity.

I don’t remember exactly what Bob said when I gave him an essay I had written on spec and asked if he would consider it for the magazine, but I remember that the look on his face suggested that I’d ruined his afternoon. I’m sure that if I hadn’t worked in the office and had simply sent him the piece, he would have rejected it. But I was there, in person, so he gave the piece his attention and a few weeks later handed me something of rare value: an unsparingly marked-up text.

IAN BURUMA

My first communication from Bob arrived by telex in Hong Kong, I think sometime in 1984. It read simply: “When can we expect Keene?” On a visit to New York, I had foolishly blurted out the idea of writing about Donald Keene’s enormous two-volume opus on modern Japanese literature, about which my knowledge was not nearly sufficient to write a serious essay.

But my fit of bluff in Bob’s office had piqued his interest. He had wanted something on Japan. The piece was deemed adequate enough for publication (“very fresh” might have been his scribbled note of encouragement). After that it was “on we go, old boy,” his usual phrase as soon as another piece had been printed. And what a journey it has been.

My life as a writer owes everything to Bob’s editorship. He had too much respect for writers he trusted to wish to change their individual styles. In this respect he was quite different from many editors, especially in the US, who see the words delivered by their contributors as raw material to, as one distinguished editor once put it to me, as though I should be grateful, “get [his] teeth into.”

Bob’s teeth marks never showed. But he had an infallible eye for loose thinking. His brilliance lay in his sense of clarity. He made you think harder. There was no room in his “paper” for fuzziness or vague abstractions. He wanted examples, descriptions, and concrete thoughts. And because he was the ideal reader you most wanted to please, you gradually learned how to express yourself better.

Some people liked to mock Bob’s mid-Atlantic drawl, which owed something to Oxford High Table talk, Plimptonian (as in George) classiness, and Long Island lockjaw. But this was not a mere affectation. Bob was that rare person: an American who loved France as dearly as he loved England, if not more so. The University of Chicago, the Sorbonne, and the best of liberal Oxford philosophers shaped his intellectual life. His clarity came from French thinking as well as Anglo-Saxon empiricism. But he remained deeply committed to the country of his birth. And I don’t just mean the Metropolitan Opera or the Ivy League schools. One of his fondest memories, which he would rehearse when he felt most relaxed, was to have been the only white soldier in an all-black military unit being trained somewhere in the American Deep South.

To me, Bob represented the best of a civilization that was rooted in the Enlightenment. But part of that liberal humanist tradition is openness to other civilizations, hence Bob’s thirst for knowledge about China, Japan, the Middle East, or indeed anywhere that was of interest.

Susan Sontag’s definition of an intellectual as someone who is interested in everything is perhaps an exaggeration. No one can be equally interested in everything, but Bob came damned close.

The idea of civilization that Bob personified is now under siege, not least in the countries that he was most closely associated with. We have lost him just when he was most needed. Our tribute must be to defend what he stood for. On we go. We owe it to him.

DAVID COLE

The package came unannounced, via Federal Express, with two books and a handwritten note: “We wondered if you’d be interested in reviewing these books for us. Bob.” That was thirteen years ago. I’ve been contributing frequently to The New York Review of Books ever since. And that means every word I’ve written—on legal subjects spanning terrorism, crime, gay rights, affirmative action, freedom of speech and religion, and the laws of war—has been handled with exquisite care, obsessive attention, and quiet grace by Bob Silvers. I’ve spent my life teaching and litigating these issues; Bob, who went to three semesters of law school in the late 1940s before deciding he wanted to be an editor, understood them as well as or better than I did.

But that was the least of it. Bob did the same with every article in every issue—on subjects as diverse as opera, history, poetry, education, contemporary politics, jazz, psychology, television, religion, film, medicine, the environment, art, fiction, and drama. From 1963 until 2006, he shared the responsibilities with Barbara Epstein. When she died, Bob never replaced her; he just added her writers to his plate.

To attend to every article in even a single issue of the Review would be a stunning achievement. Bob did it for decades (with help from a small group of extremely talented, devoted, and self-effacing editorial assistants and senior editors). If my experience is any guide, each article went through as many as five or six rounds. What this prodigious production meant was that, even in his seventies and eighties, Bob practically lived at the Review. He was seventy-four when I began working with him. He’d call with an urgent and always perceptive thought about a piece, usually at an inconvenient hour; I always took the call. I’m a morning person, but I had many conversations with him well after 11:00 PM on a weekend evening—from his office.

If Bob was willing to work around the clock on every piece he published, how could I say no to a phone call at an odd hour? He’d inevitably raise a question I hadn’t considered or had thought I could finesse. “Well, I just think the reader will want to know…,” he’d say. And he was always right. When the conversation was done, Bob would just hang up. Never a good-bye. The first five or six times, the abruptness took me aback, so out of keeping with his gentle manners and grace in every other respect. But one soon learned that it was nothing personal; he was just too busy. On to the next galley.

Bob was a consummate generalist, conversant in virtually all fields. He eschewed jargon and the language of specialists, and pushed his writers to say things as simply and clearly as possible, without in any way reducing the sophistication of the thought. Most of his writers had spent decades toiling away in the depths of their fields; Bob ensured that we communicated in ways that those not so steeped would understand. He was a master at the art of translation.

Bob was celebrated, justly, for the publication he fashioned. He received many honorary degrees and awards, including the National Humanities Medal from President Obama in 2013—a man the Review did not hesitate to criticize. But he never seemed to care much about the accolades; to Bob, they were almost a distraction from the work. The only reward he really seemed to prize was the appearance, every two weeks, of the “paper” itself. The New York Review will go on; it will be Bob’s legacy. A week before he died, even as he was confined to his apartment, he e-mailed me with an idea for a new piece. Fittingly, I suppose, he went out without a good-bye, working on the next galley.

MARK DANNER

I began working for Bob Silvers in September 1981, when I was twenty-two and fresh out of college. I was one of three assistants, informally known to contributors as elves and—to us—as slaves. Because of Bob’s astonishing appetite for work, New York Review assistants had two shifts, nine to five and two to ten. I quickly came to prefer the late shift, though this meant in practice that one often worked until eleven or twelve or even later.

The workspace was what is customarily referred to as Dickensian: towering piles of books on his large desk and our much smaller ones, which had a disconcerting habit of toppling over catastrophically at inopportune moments, heaps of manuscripts everywhere, clouds of cigarillo smoke. (Bob at that time was a chain smoker.) As an assistant I would sit behind my small piles of books, place his endless stream of phone calls to writers (“Can you hold for Robert Silvers?”), and listen for the sound of a manuscript or a book or a set of galleys landing in Bob’s outbox. Galleys—this was pre-Internet—had to be sent off by mail, FedEx, or carrier pigeon to wherever in the world the writer was hiding.

Heavily edited manuscripts had to be retyped: a delight for me because it meant deciphering Bob’s handwriting and marveling at the way he transmuted dross into gold, with nary a trace of his own voice trespassing into the piece. He was an arch ventriloquist, able to adopt the tone of any given writer: the artist as editor. The editor as artist. Manuscripts would be worked on, sometimes extensively, retyped, then set in galleys and mailed off to Berkeley, Chicago, Lucca, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge. Even on pieces he had largely rewritten, Bob would scrawl his typical note: “Dear So and So, Great thanks for your strong piece. You’ll see we have made a few small suggestions. Please let’s have changes soon. Best, Bob.” I would marvel that the authors of pieces that had been substantially rewritten would often call and profess themselves astonished that “Bob hasn’t changed a thing!”

During those long evenings Bob had a way of sensing when you were getting ready, however surreptitiously, to slip out the door. He would begin piling material into the outbox: letters to post, galleys to send, books to mail, manuscripts to type. The hours would pass: eleven, midnight, one AM. Again and again the assistant struggling to leave would be forced to shrug off his or her coat and sit back down at the typewriter. Bob fought against being alone—for he knew that soon he inevitably would be.

If one stayed late enough there was a special bonus: at a certain moment he would leap up from his chair and charge into the publisher’s office next door, and in a few minutes one would hear this somewhat gruff and imperious boss chuckling and joking and mumbling endearments. He was calling his lady love, who was just then rising in Lausanne. The sound of his voice at these moments—animated and happy, distracted for once from the piles of manuscripts and the towers of books—was enough to make up for the late hour and the terrors of the brimming outbox. He taught me, beyond editing and writing and so much else, the necessity of devotion.

JOAN DIDION

When I heard that Bob had died, I felt that the bottom had dropped out of my world. I was unprepared for it. I should have been prepared, but I wasn’t, because it seemed impossible. People like Bob don’t die; we need them too much.

Bob always shaped how I thought. I had no opinion I did not run by him first. “New York: Sentimental Journeys” (1991), on the Central Park jogger case, was far and away the hardest piece I ever worked on for this reason. Bob from the beginning knew what the piece had to be—he knew before I did—and he pushed me until I got it there. He knew exactly how dangerous the subject was, and his reaction to this danger was to make it more dangerous. His idea from the first was to get it right, to make it perfect, regardless of whatever negative reaction it might elicit in the city at that moment. When I first turned it in to him, it was clearly too long. His solution was to insist I go further. This meant making it longer. If that piece succeeds at all, it succeeds because he gave me permission to finish it.

I loved having dinner with him. We would go to the Knickerbocker Club on 62nd Street and eat Dover sole and sautéed vegetables and talk about what we needed from each other. From me, he needed a willingness to work, and from him, I needed work to do. He understood this as the fair exchange that it was.

After my husband John died, when my daughter Quintana was very sick, Bob grasped my situation, and blessedly kept me writing—on the Bush administration, on euthanasia. He intuited that I would either work or I would die. He was among the few who understood this.

I knew in 1973 how important he was to my work. I didn’t know how important he was to me personally until much later. In the last few years, our friendship was closer than it had ever been, and I thought about him every day. I wished I could have seen him more, but I knew he needed to keep working.

An editorial note from Bob would open up new possibilities both in a piece and in life itself. What could have been an empty place suddenly flooded with light and understanding.

I will always need Bob.

DEBORAH EISENBERG

It was my great and improbable good fortune to work for Bob in two capacities—once as his assistant in around 1973, and decades later as a contributor. One could say I hardly knew him, yet these experiences and the line between them are etched about as deeply as any marks in the person I feel to be myself.

Having several assistants at a time was indispensable to Bob. Tensions ran high and spilled over largely on us, so through the years Bob inevitably had many assistants, of whom I was almost certainly the worst.

I remember magic personalities orbiting the office, electric excitement and glamour. People who encountered Bob only in his later years might be surprised to learn that when my boyfriend first met him, he said, “But he makes Cary Grant look like a knobbly old turnip!” What I don’t remember is what we assistants actually did, other than wade despairingly through a loam of books, papers, and cigarette ash, and rush off to the post office at all hours.

My first day, Bob asked me to take a letter. After what seemed many hours of rhetorical sublimity declaimed in his startlingly patrician accent, Bob said, “All right, read it back, please, uh…”(What was my name?)

I was clutching pages of incomprehensible scrawl. “Gosh,” I said, “that’s the hard part, Bob.”

One’s hair really can stand on end, I learned in the frozen silence. Bob produced a brief, grim chuckle. “That’s the hard part, Bob. That’s the hard part, Bob…” he echoed, apparently in sheer incredulity.

Bob was severe, Bob was exacting, Bob was irascible—oh, why did he not fire me that day, or on any of the following days, during which I demonstrated equal incompetence, often sobbing? To escape I had to quit.

Many years passed. I was out of town, but a large package found me, bearing the familiar return address. Not possible, not possible…I quaked for a few days before opening it to find a book by a favorite writer of mine, Péter Nádas.

I wrote to Bob, saying that I was overextended as it was, and explaining the many reasons I was unqualified to write about the book. Bob wrote back immediately—countering, with immense charm, each of my points.

He remembered my name now! That note, plus irrepressible vanity on my part, equaled the French Horn of Destiny.

Well, that was the only book ever written that could tempt me to write a review, I thought—until a second one arrived, and the process was repeated, almost exactly.

It seems that Bob had an uncanny, almost diabolical, insight into what book would be irresistible to whom. But also irresistible, it turned out, was the prospect of working on another piece for him. His inexhaustible appetite for exploring the wide world was alloyed with a fastidiousness regarding detail. He attuned himself astonishingly to one’s purposes, and his delight in a finished piece was thrilling.

One feels profound gratitude to someone who wants one to accomplish something that’s apparently beyond one’s reach and who makes it possible to do so. And Bob’s conviction that the smallest elements of expression are the foundation of rigorous thought—that rigorous thought lights up the world—permeated the magazine, issue after issue. The world is in crisis; the loss of such intellectual finesse, curiosity, and force, of such wide-ranging vigilance, is a crisis on its own.

JASON EPSTEIN

When Elizabeth Hardwick, her husband Robert Lowell, Barbara, and I conceived what would become The New York Review of Books during the newspaper strike of 1962–1963, we knew that our dear friend Bob was the only possible editor. Bob, then a brilliant young Harper’s editor, had recently commissioned Lizzie to write an essay on the decline of serious criticism in America, in which she savaged the dismal Sunday book reviews for their “flat praise and the faint dissension, the minimal style and the light little article, the absence of involvement, passion, character, eccentricity—the lack, at last, of the literary tone itself.”

It was with Lizzie’s Harper’s article in mind that the four of us saw the opportunity wordlessly presented by the strike: either create the kind of review that she had envisioned or forever stop complaining. There was no middle ground, no escape, and therefore no discussion. The opportunity—indeed the obligation—had arrived of its own volition. There was no ignoring it. Bob was born to edit the review that Lizzie’s piece demanded. I called him the following day and, to our delight, he immediately accepted. He then called Barbara and asked her to be his co-editor.

That all this came together seems in retrospect to have been a miracle. The first issue achieved just the quality of gravitas and fluency we hoped for. No reader could fail to see the point of our project. What we could not have imagined at the time was the utter greatness of Bob’s achievement over fifty-four years, and the kindness and fairness that accompanied his profound wisdom. Bob was a man for the ages.

TIMOTHY GARTON ASH

We are just sitting down to Christmas lunch in London when the telephone rings: “It’s Bob. We have a dangling modifier on galley D4.” FedEx packages appeared at the remotest croft, island refuge, or East European enclave. The New York Review would always get through.

Bob Silvers was the greatest editor I have ever worked with, and part of his secret was in that D4. First there was a package, usually containing the proof copy of a book and, folded inside it, the unmistakable double-spaced typewritten letter with its famous “we hope that something might be done.” (I remember Zoë Heller joking that she would try this courtly formula when asking her children to tidy their rooms: “We hope that something might be done.”) You could not plead other commitments, because he would give you all the time you needed. There followed more packages, faxes, and e-mails, full of supporting material. When you sent him the article, on which you had sometimes worked for months, you would receive a swift response, usually containing the locution “great thanks,” and a small selection from his personal sushi tray of adjectives to describe the piece (“strong,” “important”).

But then came the marked-up text, with his characteristic scrawl on the margins of galley proofs. His essential questions were also the simplest: What do you mean? What do you really want to say? These comments were written on successive galley proofs—D4 meaning the fourth page of the fourth or D set of galleys. Loving this attritional improvement, I once got to an F galley.

In my mind’s eye, I see Bob forever picking up, perusing, and then casting aside a set of galleys. That casting aside was important, because when he came back to the D galley for the nth time, he would see something afresh. Along the way, there were wonderful long telephone conversations, drawing on his extraordinary range of knowledge and reference. I look back through the online list of my contributions over thirty-three years, and I can remember our long-distance exchanges on almost every one.

I think too of our many meetings, in Budapest, Oslo, Paris, or London, dinners in the New York apartment, lunches in the Japanese restaurant below the office: Bob always in his dark blue suit, alight with geniality, laughter, enthusiasm, and a glint of quiet steeliness. Yet even at the height of his reputation and powers, he also had an endearing touch of vulnerability.

He was never earnest but always serious. His support for dissident intellectuals everywhere was steadfast: Václav Havel, Andrei Sakharov, Nadine Gordimer, Fang Lizhi, to name but a few. Shaped by his experience in Paris during the early years of the cold war, Bob represented the values of the transatlantic West at its best. His was a self-confident but also a self-critical liberalism. The more the Review criticized the dark sides of American policy (in Vietnam, Central America, Iraq, and elsewhere), the more it enhanced American soft power. Despite several brave attempts, no one has ever made a successful pan-European literary review, and so The New York Review remains the nearest thing we Europeans have to one—a common intellectual reference point from Lisbon to Tallin, and from Athens to Edinburgh.

When I wrote about fifty years of The New York Review in these pages in 2013, I reflected on how this liberal, transatlantic West was already under challenge from many sides. There is bitter irony in the fact that Bob has died just as an antiliberal counterrevolution, already manifest in Moscow, Beijing, Istanbul, and Budapest, is threatening the three Western heartlands he knew and loved best: Britain, with Brexit, France, with the rise of Marine Le Pen, and the United States, with you-know-who. We need his spirit more than ever, and we shall keep its flame burning.

ALMA GUILLERMOPRIETO

When in 1998 John Paul II became the first pope to visit Cuba, Bob immediately agreed that I should go. Of course there was never any money for travel, but he scraped something together. I joined a cheap package tour of Catholic pilgrims at a travel agency in Mexico and happily wrote two stories from that trip: one about the pope’s visit and a later one about Fidel Castro, whose infirmities were just beginning to show (although he would hold on to power for another ten years).

Even as we were closing the pope story Bob was on the phone about another one. Shouldn’t I be doing something about human rights on the island? My back stiffened. I dislike categories in general because they narrow down reality, and “human rights,” I said, was one that in Cuba led readers and writers right back to a useless cold war understanding of a Latin American country.

Bob was having none of that. How could we run two stories on a country that had lived under the systematic repression of thought and expression for decades, and not mention it? I grumbled and fought; the summer heat was approaching, I had no sources, a rumor was going about that everyone’s go-to human rights victim was now suspect, and, ultimately, I hated the very idea. Not knowing of Bob’s ties to that institution, I said the whole thing sounded like something worthy of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Well, dearie, Bob said (dearie, unlike kiddo, was in Bobspeak a term not of affection but of annoyance), one’s thoughts go back to those poor men, the writers and the thinkers and those who simply wish to remain apart, held in dark, dank cells for years and years. One’s thoughts go back and linger there with them, and one can’t help wondering, is there something to be done? Are we not obliged to address their situation in some small way?

The argument went on for days. The pope story ran, the Fidel story went into galleys, and Bob wouldn’t give up. In the end, it became a question of being unspeakably rude to him or saying yes, and so I went and reported and wrote the story I should have volunteered for in the first place. Indeed, the situation of dozens of men (men only, at that point) held in prison on absurd charges, in obscene conditions, was intolerable. I was embarrassed for myself and both appalled and fascinated by what I saw. How could we not address, in some small way, the situation of people laboring under such injustice? Bob made his writers better writers by pushing them to think better.

SUE HALPERN

Nine days before she died, I turned in my last piece for Barbara Epstein, which, as one of “Barbara’s writers,” I assumed would be my last for The New York Review. I knew there was little chance she would read it, and even less chance it would be published, but it felt imperative to see through that final collaboration, ignoring the reality at hand and offering up a little normalcy. For months she edited manuscripts while hooked up to the chemo machine, so I could also imagine her, pen in hand, wrestling with words till the very end.

A few weeks later, the phone rang. It was Robert Silvers. “We’ll be sending galleys of your [fill in the blank with an adjective of high praise] article soon.” We talked briefly about the piece, and at length about Barbara, whom we both loved dearly. “What would you like to do next?” Bob asked before we hung up. And with that, I was one of “Bob’s writers,” too.

Packages of books began to arrive unbidden. Tucked inside would be a brief, telegraphic message, something on the order of “see what you can do.” I confess that I was not always happy to find these leaning up against the front door, and I would give them a wide berth for days, knowing that once I tore open the FedEx envelope, I’d be working like mad to master the subject at hand. But I also knew that before long Bob would be calling to wonder if I’d gotten those books, and when I might have something for him. He was wily like that.

I loved talking with Bob. On the phone, for sure, when I could always count on him to leave me with some insight or something to think about, but even more sitting knee-to-knee on the office couch, where somehow, always, we would make each other laugh. The truest thing I know about Bob was expressed in that sound: his delight in the world. If I had to pick a single word to describe him, it would not be brilliant, or driven, or perspicacious, or courtly, or generous, or honest, or curious, or kind, or polymathic, or good—all of which apply—it would be “delighted.” Just look at his eyes in any picture and there it is.

A while ago, a writer with a number of best sellers to her name got in touch after getting her first Review assignment, to ask what she needed to know in order to write for Bob. I was stymied at first, and then realized why: one didn’t write for Bob. One wrote for oneself, and for the reader, and Bob was there to ensure that—to paraphrase (and contradict) T.S. Eliot—every raid on the inarticulate did not end in the general mess of imprecision of feeling. His goal was not to insert himself and his point of view into a piece, but rather to enable the writer to make an argument with clarity and disposition. He trusted his writers to say what they needed to say and they, in turn, trusted him to help them do so. He knew their capacities. Sometimes he knew them better than they did themselves.

“All right, kiddo,” he said, signing off, the last time we spoke. In that conversation he happened to mention that the medications he’d been taking were not working. Honestly, he seemed more concerned about Trump’s immigration policy. He suggested, in his offhand way, that I might read a certain article in Foreign Policy. It was something to think about. So I did.

JENNIFER HOMANS

I always thought of Bob as a brilliant man, all mind. This could be disconcerting, and there was a moment when I thought of him as strangely impersonal and detached. It was 2008 and my late husband Tony Judt had just been diagnosed with ALS and had written to Bob explaining his dire situation. Tony had been writing for Bob for nearly two decades. Before Bob, Tony had been an accomplished historian of Europe. Almost immediately though, Bob pushed him to expand his range and began sending him books on American foreign policy, Primo Levi, Jean Genet, Israel-Palestine, and, later, the Bush years, the Iraq war, and more. He pushed Tony’s writing too. Pre-Bob the writing was academic; post-Bob, there was a sea change and Tony’s prose became lighter, clearer, “strong,” as Bob liked to say.

Bob had become a constant presence in our lives. Which is why I was so shocked when he responded to Tony’s helpless note with a few breezy lines: We’ll be in touch soon! Weeks passed. Then he came for a visit. Tony was feeling low that day, sitting wan and pale in the back room in his corner chair. I felt like I had been living with Bob for years, but in fact he had never been to our apartment. He wafted cheerfully into the room in his suit and scarf, bringing the news of the world with him. After some very British-sounding abstractions about how tough life could be, they immediately switched to politics, and I remember Tony struggling to keep up or care. He was just too sick. It seemed an impossible situation, these two men, all mind, one rapidly losing his body, and neither knowing quite what to say.

What happened next changed my view of Bob, but also of Tony. By then, Tony was quadriplegic and on a breathing machine, writing only with the help of an assistant or whoever was there to be his hands at the keyboard. He started composing pieces at night in his head and reciting them in the morning. He sent one to Bob, who immediately published it. They were back in touch. There would be a series, it was a project, and Bob was right there. But these were not the usual pieces on books and politics; they were deeply personal reflections and memories. Soon after, Bob told me the essays made him think of Central European writers and a memoir form he hadn’t seen for some time. He and Tony had found a common language.

When Bob turned eighty in 2009, Tony composed a note, knowing he would die soon:

More seriously, and I know that I have to stand in line to say this, you will always be an extraordinary editor—by far the best I have ever known and, it seems fair to assert, by far the best there is. You surely do not need me to tell you about the place that the NYR holds in the hearts and minds (sorry!) of hundreds of thousands of readers from Berkeley to Beijing. And, of course, above all, you are a legend in your own time zone. It is a pleasure and an honour to work with you and I look forward to many more conversations and galleys….

Affectionately,
Tony

Bob wrote back with his preternatural restraint:

I just read your words here and wanted to tell you how much they meant to me. Every good thing to you both.

My best,
Bob

Tony forwarded me the response with a brief message:

I think this is the closest I have ever seen Bob get to being moved. I am so pleased I wrote it. Love, T

When Tony died, Bob was still there. Upon the publication of Thinking the Twentieth Century, Tony’s last book, written with Tim Snyder, I called Bob: I don’t know if I can do it, but will you help me if I write something? He said yes, please try. When he received my text, Bob focused on certain emotional words, encouraging me to rein in the feeling, take out the fleshy excess, leave only the bones. I fought for the flesh but he called again and again, telling me how much stronger it would be if understated. I was still in grief: it felt horrible, let it be horrible. But he was looking for a kind of poise. Distance and reflection, even in the face of disaster.

Bob had a classical mind, I think. Disciplined, spare, all emotion distilled. In late December when his partner Grace died, I wrote him a note of condolence. He had always said that she was “marvelous,” “quite a gal,” and she was often tucked somewhere into his notes about the work: “I’m in Switzerland with Grace.” “Grace sends love.” When he got my note, he wrote back as he did to so many with a rare show of raw emotion: “I am nowhere without Grace.” It is often said that people die the way they live, and his death made him come clear in my mind. He died with the woman he loved. Without her he was nowhere. It was poetic, understated, a life well lived. His absence is difficult to accept. He was always there and now he is not.

MARK LILLA

We do not have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of soul.

—Robert Musil

It’s a romantic dogma, rooted in God knows what gnostic heresy, that the world is divided into those who think and those who feel. The Mirror and the Lamp, the Dynamo and the Virgin. And that this is how it should be. Tell a romantic you understand him and you have pronounced a death sentence. It means his wings have been clipped and his soul has begun its descent. Oh, Lord, please let me be misunderstood. What keeps him airborne is the conviction that those are philistines pounding the pavement below.

Countless little magazines and literary reviews have been conceived as a refuge from the crowd, a perch for Icarus. The New York Review was meant to be different. Frustrated by the lazy gentility of American book reviewing and its detachment from wider intellectual and cultural currents, the editors invented a genre for what they hoped would be a new audience. The digressive review-essay style that became the paper’s trademark presumed that a writer could bring intellect to matters of soul without violating either, and that there was an audience for such writing. From the start, the Review was a democratic, pedagogical project.

This I knew when I began writing for Bob Silvers back in the 1990s. What I didn’t know was that the pedagogy was intended for the author as well. Bob was a teacher, one of the greatest I have ever encountered. Many stories have been told of his legendary interventionism—the late-night calls about an obscure sentence, the flood of packages, faxes, and later e-mails with suggested reading, not always to the point but welcome as signs of his enthusiasm. Profiles by journalists could make him appear an endearing fussbudget. But nothing I have read asks the only pertinent question: Why did he take the trouble? Why bother? After all, people now consume so much “content,” so fast, that they don’t notice. Errors in print can be fixed online instantaneously. And besides, we’re all publishers now, so who needs a superego?

What the journalists missed, but his writers knew, is that the process of endless refinement was the point. Bob at work on a manuscript resembled nothing so much as a Jesuit spiritual adviser, minus the collar, helping the novice refine his raw inner awareness. It was a vocation, in the strict sense, an expression of magnanimity. He was determined to see that a book got the appreciation and criticism it deserved. But even more, it seemed to me, he wanted the writer to understand himself better than he already did. You say this, and you’re on to something, but what does it really mean? What are you trying to say? Bob had a profound abhorrence of vagueness. It was the cardinal sin because it was cowardly, a self-evasion. More than once I wanted to tear the hairshirt off. Icarus, c’est moi. He never permitted it because he was more loyal to me than I was to myself.

In reading the Review, you always learn something. In writing for Bob, you became something. It was a gift none of us really deserved. But what gift ever is? That’s what makes it a gift.

JANET MALCOLM

“What are you working on?”
“I’m writing a piece for Bob.”

This exchange, often heard around the city, will be heard no more. Now we will have to write for an imaginary Bob—though on some level we were always writing for an imaginary Bob. He was our literary conscience. He was the figure looking over our shoulders as we wrote, holding us to a rare standard. When you wrote “for Bob” you felt the pressure of a demand to be interesting. You do not bore a genius. You do as good an impersonation as you can of someone worthy of his attention.

The imaginary Bob appealed to the better parts of our writing natures, to our capacity for audacity and unpredictability; and, of course, he couldn’t always rouse them. But the best pieces in the magazine had a shimmer that came from outside of themselves. As one read them a sense of Bob came into the room.

His actual interventions in the manuscripts I submitted usually had to do with questions of fact. He wanted to know more about something, or he wanted something added that he knew should be there. He was after the truth of things, which begins with the facts of things. He seemed to know more facts than anyone else in the world did and to understand their power. In today’s new order of untruthfulness (do you remember the good old order of mere truthiness?) his legacy has a moral significance beyond description.

FINTAN O’TOOLE

The great editor is a chimerical creature, combining contrary qualities in one mind: assertive and self-effacing, commanding and sensitive, infinitely curious and sharply focused, patient and fearfully demanding, wide-angle and close-up. Robert Silvers was the greatest editor of our time because he managed these contradictions with a seemingly effortless elegance. He was able, somehow, to show his writers only the gentler sides—the civility, the patience, the infinite care for the smallest details of an essay. Their other sides—the unbending standards of excellence, the phenomenal drive, the larger mission of which your own piece was but a tiny part—were never explicitly expressed. They did not have to be: writers—and more importantly readers—could never miss the force of their steadfast presence.

The thing that everyone privileged enough to write for Robert Silvers will remember is the mystery of the Federal Express packet of books that would arrive every so often. Mysterious because you had no idea what you were going to get. Sometimes it would be stuff that you more or less knew about; sometimes not. Bob did not believe in comfort zones. In any other editor this might have been eccentric, even perverse. But with Bob it was a deeply serious act of faith. He believed that there is such a thing as the general reader, that public life depends on the existence of a common space in which ideas can be shared, absorbed, mulled over, kicked around. And if there is the general reader, there must also be the general writer. If you were lucky enough to write for The New York Review, you had to be prepared to share what you knew or thought without arrogance or condescension. Sometimes you had to go further and share what you didn’t know until Bob’s quiet demands sent you off to learn it.

What he was doing in this was holding a crucial middle ground. He understood better than anyone else that the public realm has to fight for its existence against two equally great dangers. One is the culture of self-enclosed, technocratic expertise, the hiving off of intellectual life into increasingly minute specializations and increasingly impenetrable professional dialects. The other is the insistence—so much in the ascendant now—that there is no expertise at all, that scholarship and rigor and evidence are the mere playthings of elitist eggheads. Bob’s great gift to civic life was the living demonstration in every issue of the Review that these impostors could be treated with equal—and magnificent—contempt. He held open the space for that great republican virtue: common curiosity. He made this fierce effort seem so natural that it is only in his absence that we realize how hard it is to do and how much it counts.

I always come back in thinking about Bob to his imperturbable courtesy. His good manners were not mere mannerisms. They said something. They were a constant reminder to the rest of us that we owed readers the same consideration—to think things through as best we could, to avoid shortcuts and lazy assumptions, to write as well as we could manage. And to remember that it all matters, that the life of a great journal is part of the life of democracy itself. We know better than we have ever known how boorishness and vulgarity pollute public life. Robert Silvers showed us better than any other editor how courtesy and care sustain it.

DARRYL PINCKNEY

For the longest time I called him Mr. Silvers. A couple of Elizabeth Hardwick’s other former students were his editorial assistants and I hung around the office while still an undergraduate. After college, I got temporary work in the mailroom of the Review. Then one day a parcel arrived at my apartment, a book and a letter from Robert Silvers. Maybe he used that phrase—to see what can be done. I’d never had a conversation of any kind with him before. I’d been introduced, but after that he lived in his own world in the office. Barbara Epstein in those early years wouldn’t talk to me any more than she had to. When it came time to discuss the piece, he was pleasant, talked easily of Jimmy Baldwin, and knew more about my subject than I expected him to. Professor Hardwick—not yet Lizzie to me—had been through the piece before I walked it in, so there was not too much of a painful nature left to say.

I’d sat down scared out of my head and I stood up still scared stupid and down through the next forty years I never, I mean never, got over being scared of him. James Fenton, my partner, could talk with him at length, but in a social setting, I had to let him turn away after two minutes or so. Mr. Silvers, back when, had among his assistants a smart, poised girl who was sometimes absent for elegant reasons. I became her substitute and so spent some hours with him, listening to him talk to others. One New Year’s Eve about nine o’clock I asked him if it would be OK if I went off. He said yes, but it would also be OK if I wanted to stay.

I also remember his tyranny in the office. It was tiresome for Barbara, because she grew up with a father who yelled. I’d gone from Mr. Silvers’s office to the typesetting studio to sitting outside Barbara’s office door and the hardest thing about being her assistant was learning, firstly, that you could not protect her from him, and, secondly, that she didn’t need anyone’s protection. Their battles were over a writer’s argument, a writer’s prose. The Review’s style emerged from Bob and Barbara’s clashes that, looking back, obscured how similar in sensibility they actually were. For me, it was part of the emotional chaos and intellectual thrill of the place. A cool friend who also worked at the Review had to warn me to chill the Review snob act a bit when we were hanging out downtown. The best thing about the Review was some of the people in the office, the friends you made, young writers whose work you fell for. And, yes, there was the education you got or made up for just by reading it.

There’s the first word and then there’s the last word, but even Edmund Wilson was dumb once, Lizzie said. Bob and Grace really loved her, and that was my bond with Bob, love for Elizabeth Hardwick and her love for The New York Review of Books, which, she said more than once, had saved her life.

YASMINE EL RASHIDI

When Bob took an interest in my world, he quite literally opened the world to me. Our relationship began with the Egyptian uprising of 2011, and in a conversation over those initial weeks that extended across months, into years, I lived and thought through with him the most profound experience of my life.

Bob gave me a sense of value as a writer—in the attention he offered, and in the trust. When he asked if something might be done about the Egyptian presidential election, he delighted in a piece that instead examined the particularities of the Egyptian bureaucracy. He sent clips, books, letters, offering you things to think about—consider—but in the end, he was genuinely interested in what as a writer you came back with, in content, voice, form. The Review quickly became my writing home, and Bob my measure, my guide. There was no other reader. He was the one who mattered most.

Bob cared about his writers—not just the legendary ones. He cared about our well-being, our safety, even our personal lives. After sharing an experience I had with Egyptian security that particularly rattled me, his concern grew, and he often called to ask if I felt safe, if I needed anything. He suggested ways I might tell the story, even perhaps “a short story” for the “paper” instead.

He stood by us, too. One of my last pieces for him, about the violent clashes between the military and the Muslim Brotherhood that followed the fall of President Mohamed Morsi’s government in the summer of 2013, generated an avalanche of controversy. Bob had pushed, respectfully, through a rigorous process of checking facts and statements to verify the position my reporting had led me to take—one that ran contrary to that of almost every major international news organization—and once the piece had gone to press, he was unflinching in his support. I heard of the critical and questioning letters from others, never him. He only ever thanked me for writing it.

Bob always seemed immensely pleased to see you. He made you feel as if there was nothing more thrilling—marvelous—in that moment than your company. He had an energy, enthusiasm, and buoyancy that were infectious, and he was magnanimous in every way. When I suggested that I might need some time away from Cairo, he did everything to support and make that possible, helping my passage to New York. And when I shared with him my struggle to write a nonfiction book on Egypt, he gently prodded, asking questions to coax out of me thoughts on the story I wanted to tell. He was the first to suggest that fiction might be the form for me. This was a measure of his openness—his understanding and care and sense of his writers beyond the scope of what was considered their realm; it was also part of why and how he came to be their friend as well.

Over the past two and a half years, as I worked on a piece for him from and about Cairo, we had lunches and exchanged e-mails and letters and occasionally the phone would ring. I walked the streets of my city thinking about everything with him in mind. He seemed unwavering in his patience and encouragement, still completely engaged and enthusiastic about the project twenty-eight months later. A couple of months before he died, in a letter about a novel he was sending me for review, he added a postscript about my “Notes”—as we had tentatively entitled the piece—suggesting that it “need not be conclusive.” In his absence, I feel a void, a sense of disorientation, the knowledge that my “Notes” will never, without his eyes, feel either conclusive or complete.

NATHANIEL RICH

Sharpening pencils, fetching dry cleaning, taking dictation, dodging sharpened pencils thrown at your head—life as Bob’s editorial assistant was unglamorous and often had little to do with editing. It took time to win his trust. As a new assistant, weeks removed from college graduation, I longed for an editorial assignment, the ultimate test of a staffer’s mettle. Bob only handed over essays that he had grown sick of trying to wrestle into coherence. These forsaken manuscripts sat on a corner of his desk, often buried under books, languishing for months if not years—the pariahs of the editorial roster. Bob rarely gave up on them but the presence of this pile was a constant affront, a black mark on an otherwise undefeated record.

My moment finally arrived several months into the job, when he lifted a manuscript from the pariah pile and called my name—itself a minor milestone in an assistant’s life, the direct address. My excitement curdled to dread when I saw the piece: a British lord’s assessment of a Nobel laureate’s monograph about economic modeling. I could not imagine an essay I was less suited to work on. I had defiantly avoided taking a single economics course in college and could not begin to understand any of the technical words the author used, let alone his argument. Ashamed, I admitted as much to Bob.

“Nonsense!” he said.

He explained that my ignorance of the subject, on the contrary, made me an ideal reader for the piece. He leapt from his chair and scanned the shelves behind his desk, where he kept his reference books. Down tumbled The Penguin Dictionary of Economics, Barron’s Dictionary of Finance and Investment Terms, An Encyclopedia of Keynesian Economics, and a half-dozen other volumes, landing with thuds on his desk. All the definitions I needed could be found in these books, he said, before launching into a brief lecture on growth theory. My job, he explained, was to translate the piece into language that even a person as ignorant of economic theory as I was could understand.

This was my introduction to one of the central tenets of Bob’s editorial philosophy. Good writing is capable of bringing to life even the most arcane subjects. Big ideas demand vivid prose. Academic jargon is fatal, as are stock expressions, terms of art, empty metaphors. Dead language not only obscures the ideas it means to describe. It blocks original thinking. Many writers will say that Bob brought out their best prose. He did more than that. He brought out their highest thoughts.

Clarity of prose leads to clarity of mind. And without clarity of mind, moral clarity is impossible. I forgot what Bob taught me about economics but I’ll never forget that.

INGRID D. ROWLAND

After any phone conversation, Bob Silvers hung up with a distinctive, resonant klunk—he was done, he was satisfied, and it was time to get back to work. He called The New York Review “our little paper.” His was certainly an editorial “we”—and who, among editors, had more right to that regal pronoun?—but more importantly, that “we” reflected his sense that the paper truly belonged to all of us: readers, writers, editors, printers, publishers, the people who run newsstands in Athens and Rome and all the other surprising corners of the world where The New York Review has become part of life. Pondered quietly, hotly argued, it outlives the paper on which it is printed through memories of words, phrases, readings, experiences, through conversations between people who have connected with one another because of its existence.

And Bob, like an orchestra conductor or a theatrical director, could fixate obsessively on the tiniest detail of phrasing or punctuation without ever losing his grasp of the whole enterprise. In many ways, “our little paper” is a fluid, ephemeral enterprise, writ on water, as Keats might say, but what does water do? When drop meets drop, the two merge to create a rivulet, a stream, the Amazon. Water moves forever onward, bound for the sea—except when it leaps, on clouds, straight into the sky. However fleeting an article, an issue, or a reader’s reverie may be in itself, the momentum they create, like the momentum of water, is relentless. Bob’s great gift was the ability to guide that momentum in every direction, into the desert, into the darkness, into the light. He lived, ultimately, for love and beauty, and he followed them into that good night.

ZADIE SMITH

A writer friend asked me: What was it about Bob? The edit? Or the commission? Another writer present—who also wrote for Bob—laughed at the word “commission,” and I realized I found it strange, too. Bob didn’t commission as much as elicit, a word whose Latin root means “to draw out by trickery or magic.” He was an expert eliciter. The very first time I wrote for him was because I made the mistake of saying, during the course of a casual conversation, “Well, I’ve been thinking a bit about Kafka.” Kafka! He said the name back to me as if I had just mentioned the very latest literary sensation. “Well, why don’t we see if something can’t be done about that?”

A fairly recent book about Kafka soon arrived at my door, then several others. Then articles and notes and more books. This was disarming. My experience writing for editors up to that point had been confined to British newspapers where the emphasis was upon speed, topicality, and personal alignment with the subject. There’s nothing a British editor likes more than sending out a recent novel about the Berlin Wall to a writer who only last year wrote a novel about the Berlin Wall.

I wrote on Kafka, it ran, we were off. Many more pieces on even less likely subjects followed. Bob gave a lot of freedom to his writers, but the way he handled pieces was the opposite of a free-for-all. It’s a combination difficult to describe. The things you could get away with at the Review you could never get away with elsewhere: Bob wasn’t a grammar weenie; he didn’t rule out the personal or obscenity. He prized rationality and clarity but not at the expense of passion. He taught you not to speak vaguely of “historical context,” or indeed overuse “vaguely,” or suggest that two things were “inextricably entwined.”

But it was more than that. He valued individual sensibilities, more than any editor I ever knew. Though often accused of relying on too small a circle of contributors, it cannot be said that his paper suffered from a uniformity of tone. To read it cover-to-cover was to experience stylistic whiplash, from the conversational to the drily academic, from aggressive provocation to the intimate or dreamily philosophic. Bob’s “paper” was a very broad church with a narrow entrance marked: if it’s good.

I don’t know if he ever realized how little I’d known or understood in the beginning. Didn’t know my favorite Sontag essays came out of this “paper,” or that Bob had edited Baldwin, or known Lowell intimately, or helped edit the early Paris Review. We’d had lunch quite a few times before I learned he was a Jewish boy from Long Island rather than the Bostonian wasp that—from his fancy suits and frequent references to Lowell—I had somehow imagined he was. But being very stupid about lots of things was not a disqualifying trait in Bob’s mind: like an indulgent parent he focused on your peculiar strengths. He was even a little suspicious of formal academic expertise, at least if it came at the price of a readable sentence.

His greatest pleasure was those people who approached his own intellectual ambidexterity: a doctor with a fancy prose style, say, or a president who understood and appreciated poetry. When considering such people he would get a very merry look in his eye—since he is not editing this piece let’s call it a “glint”—and say, “Well, now, he’s really a sort of genius you know, a genius! Ha! Ha!” Always the happy laugh at the end. Other people’s genius aroused no envy in him; it was only ever a source of delight.

About the rest of us he had a clear eye. She’s a bit weak on Iraq but absolutely marvelous on Alexander Pope. He knows everything about the theater but nothing at all about politics. This is presumably what allowed him to decide, very early on, that he wasn’t a writer himself, though I always found it hard to believe: the way he edited was effectively writing. It was like having a second architect appear during construction, suggesting a west wing here or a second floor. You could get a bit petulant about it. Have you considered x? is not always what you want to hear when you’ve just written two thousand words on y. But he was always right.

“Will Bob be there? I owe him a piece.” An anxious query tacked onto many an RSVP for a New York literary party. But even if you didn’t owe him you had to be careful: in company Bob was like a shark in a shoal, trawling for pieces, waiting for unsuspecting writers to drunkenly let slip that they were interested in Sibelius or Croatia or had a theory about Philip Glass. Sometimes the process of eliciting could feel a little like entrapment. Not because he was strict with a deadline, but because to agree to write something for Bob was to know there was no way you’d be phoning it in, you’d be holding yourself to the highest standard—his.

Perhaps the greatest aspect of Bob’s legacy is the generations of editorial assistants he spread abroad. Whenever I am being particularly astutely edited elsewhere it usually turns out that the red pen belongs to an ex-assistant of Bob’s. Thank God—I always need the help. Many of Bob’s writers were Nobel Prize winners, true geniuses, all-rounders of the C.P. Snow variety. They would have written brilliantly anywhere. But there were others, like me, from whom Bob not only elicited work, but helped directly to improve, educate, and form. I loved him for it and I’ll miss writing for him so much.

Additional remembrances of Robert Silvers by more than sixty New York Review contributors and friends can be found at nybooks.com/rbs.

The post Robert B. Silvers (1929–2017) appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

French schoolchildren used to be taught that they were descended from the Gauls, a tribe that emerged around the fifth century BC. It is a common conceit of nineteenth-century nationalism that citizens of modern nation-states can trace their national origins back to a remote past. Not so long ago, a Japanese professor maintained that “Japanese values” were already in evidence more than ten thousand years ago among the Jomon period hunter-gatherers.

Much of this is nonsense. But the Chinese at least have a better claim than most people of being heirs to a unified culture that began roughly in the third century BC. This idea forms the basis of the fascinating exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Qin and Han dynasty artifacts. Almost all the objects lay buried for many centuries in tombs. That is why we can see perfectly preserved lacquer ware from a burial site in Sichuan, richly colored textiles from the far west of China, the body of Dou Wan, wife of Prince Jing, encased in a suit made of jade, and much more. And all these are more than two thousand years old.

In 221 BC, the Qin conquered six other kingdoms in what is now geographically a part of China. Under the first emperor, Qin Shihuangdi—reviled in Chinese history as a tyrant, but much admired by the no less brutal Mao Zedong—the Chinese language was unified in a common writing system. A common currency was introduced, as well as a system of weights and measures. Central power was exercised through an elaborate bureaucracy. The First Emperor also mobilized hundreds of thousands of slave workers and convicts to build roads, waterways, and, most famously, parts of what came to be known as the Great Wall.

The Han dynasty that toppled the Qin in 206 BC was in many ways more humane. Whereas the First Emperor allegedly buried Confucian scholars alive after burning their books, because, rather like Chairman Mao, he wished to start his reign on a clean slate and couldn’t tolerate dissent, Confucianism became the state ideology under the Han emperors. Rare stone tablets from the Eastern Han dynasty (AD 25-220), engraved with texts from Confucian classics, that once stood in front of a lecture hall, were excavated in the 1980s, and are now on show at the Met.

Zhixin Jason Sun, who curated the exhibition, writes in the catalogue that the dominance of Confucian thought “undoubtedly struck a heavy blow against intellectual development, and, consequently, had a lasting negative effect over the next two millennia.” This is one of the clichés of leftist Chinese propaganda. Confucianism, revised endlessly by scholarship over the last two thousand years, is too diverse a philosophy to lend itself to such a sweeping statement. The least one can say is that from the beginning Confucian ideas constituted a secular attempt to devise a moral political order. That it was often used—and still is—as a doctrine of bureaucratic oppression should not obscure its remarkably enlightened origins. Contrary to what the current Communist Party, or indeed the likes of Lee Kuan Yew, the late Singaporean prime minister, have made of it, an important strand of Confucianism, developed by the fourth-century philosopher Mencius, holds that people have the right to rebel against an unjust ruler.

Even though certain aspects of Chinese civilization, such as the uniform written language, do indeed go all the way back to the First Emperor of Qin, it is highly unlikely that most people living under his rule, or indeed in later dynasties, thought of themselves as “Chinese” in the same way citizens of the PRC or Taiwan, or in the global Chinese diaspora, do now. Still, the exhibition reminded me of an experience I had a few decades ago, when I visited the Chinese galleries at the British Museum in London after seeing a show of Russian Orthodox art. It felt like coming back to a familiar world of plain humanity, after being immersed in sacred images meant to awe the viewer in a display of religious power. And there is something rather Chinese about that.

What is striking even of the artifacts produced under the despotic Qin emperor is how down to earth many of them are. The soldiers in his terracotta army, protecting the emperor in his tomb, are not stylized figures, or symbols of otherworldly power, but individual human beings sculpted with a remarkable sense of realism. “Down to earth” is of course a relative concept, since the bulk of the objects on display were dug up from the tombs of aristocrats, whose lives would have had very little in common with the peasants who provided them with their food, dug the canals, served in the imperial armies, and built the first bits of the Great Wall.

It would also be a mistake to forget how different people in the distant (or even the not so distant) past were to most of us in the way they saw the world. Like the ancient Egyptians, the Chinese who could afford to think about such things at all were obsessed with notions of immortality and the afterlife. That is why we can still enjoy the glories of the terracotta soldiers in the Qin Emperor’s vast tomb that was a microcosm of life on earth. There were sculptures of pet animals too, and dancers and acrobats to entertain him, and model palaces, parks, and pavilions. Rivers of mercury wended their way through mountain ranges of bronze. And the bones of his concubines, sacrificed to comfort their ruler in the afterlife, were found inside the tomb as well.

From the First Emperor’s tomb to funerals in our own time, the traditional Chinese view of the afterlife is hardly any different from life on earth. People are still buried with paper money and model cars, as well as food. The superbly crafted Han dynasty bronze bowls, wine vessels, and lamps, and the exquisite red and black lacquer food containers, would have been of practical use to the deceased if they had indeed lived on as people believed they would. In life after death, the Chinese grandees were still expected to take delight in the beauties of nature, splendid animals, good food and fine wines, as well as graceful dancers and bed companions. Having been beautifully preserved underground for thousands of years, these objects delight us still.

One of the attractive qualities of Qin and Han culture, shared by the arts of many later eras, is their cosmopolitanism. Chinese artisans and their patrons loved to adopt and adapt designs and shapes imported from Iran, India, Central Asia, and perhaps even ancient Greece. Golden ornaments with horse motifs that predate the Qin dynasty show the influence of Scythian designs. Gold beads excavated from Han tombs are worked with fine filigree that suggests Persian or Bactrian origins. Even during periods of oppressive central control, China was never really closed to outside influences.

This high level of sophistication creates the illusion that if we were to meet a cultivated Chinese of the second century BC at a dinner party today, we would have much to talk about. It is easy to forget that the past remains another country. But perhaps it isn’t a complete illusion. Despite periods of horrendous violence, savage wars, and cruel oppression, something of the humanist spirit of ancient China has survived. In another thousand years, if mankind is still around, Chairman Mao’s attempt to stamp it out will look like a tiny blip in Chinese history. There is consolation in that.

“Age of Empires: Art of the Qin and Han Dynasties” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through July 16.

The post The Earthy Glories of Ancient China appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Of all the masters of the woodblock print in the Edo Period, Utamaro has the most colorful reputation. Hokusai was perhaps the greatest draughtsman, Hiroshige excelled in landscapes, and Kuniyoshi had the wildest theatrical flair. Utamaro (1753–1806) was the lover of women.

Not only did he create extraordinary prints and paintings of female beauties, often high-class prostitutes, but he was also, it was said, a great habitué of the brothels in Edo himself. Prostitutes, even at the top end of the market, no longer have any of the glamor associated with their trade in eighteenth-century Japan, but “Utamaro” is the name of a large number of massage parlors that still dot the areas where famous pleasure districts once used to be. Even in Utamaro’s time, the glamor of prostitutes was largely a fantasy promoted in guidebooks and prints. He made a living providing pictures of the “floating world” of commercial sex, commissioned by publishers who were paid by the brothel owners.

Three remarkable paintings by Utamaro set in different red light districts in Edo are the main attraction of “Inventing Utamaro: A Japanese Masterpiece Rediscovered,” a fascinating exhibition at the Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C. The last time all three were seen together was in the late 1880s in Paris. The Japanese dealer Hayashi Tadamasa kept the earliest (between 1780 and 1790) and best one for himself. It is called Moon at Shinagawa (1788–1790), and shows an elegant teahouse with a view of the sea. A number of finely dressed “courtesans” are seen playing musical instruments, reading poems, and bringing out dainty dishes. This painting was acquired by Charles Lang Freer in 1903 and is now part of the Freer/Sackler collection.

Cherry Blossoms in Yoshiwara (1792–1794), a gaudier picture of women singing and dancing in a typical teahouse/brothel with cherry blossom trees in full bloom outside, was sold to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, in the 1950s. But the whereabouts of the third picture was a mystery until it suddenly turned up at the Okada Museum of Art in Hakone, Japan, in 2014. Snow at Fukagawa (1802–1806), a little clumsily touched up recently by a Chinese restorer, again shows a tableau of women engaged in various activities—playing the three-stringed samisen, carrying bedding, drinking—associated with a house of pleasure.

In all three pictures, there is an almost total absence of men. These are women on display for the eyes of men, no doubt, advertisements for the sexual trade that played such an important part in the merchant culture of the Edo Period (1603–1868). Politically oppressive, the authorities nonetheless gave license to men to indulge themselves in amusements of varying degrees of sophistication acted out in a narrow and interconnected world of brothels and Kabuki theaters. Sex, kept in bounds by rules of social etiquette, was less threatening to the authorities than political activity. (Utamaro was arrested once, not for his pornographic prints, but for depicting samurai grandees, which was forbidden.) And the roles played by the women in this world, especially the high-class ones, were hardly less stylized and artificial than those performed at the Kabuki.

Utamaro’s personal reputation as a ladies’ man may be as imaginary as the sexual games acted out in the brothels. Very little is known about his life. It is known that he trained as an apprentice to an artist named Toriyama Sekien, who switched from the austere art of the Kano School to making prints of ogres and other fantastical figures in illustrated books.

The legend of Utamaro as a demon of art, as well as an erotic connoisseur, began early on, but was later burnished in a movie by the great director Mizoguchi Kenji, entitled Utamaro and His Five Women (1946), which was based on a novel of the same title. The portrayal of the artist probably owes more to the way Mizoguchi saw himself than to historical accuracy.

The exotic image of traditional Japan as a kind of paradise of sexual refinement, which was already the product of a fantasy world promoted by artists like Utamaro, appealed to sophisticated collectors, writers, and artists in late-nineteenth-century Paris. The pleasure world of the Edo Period was seen as an elegant and sensuous antidote to the ugliness of the industrial age. And the same was true in Japan.

At first, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, when the Japanese were eager to modernize along Western lines, the hedonism of Floating World prints, and the wilder shores of Kabuki, were considered rather shameful. Soon, however, the popular theatrical genres and sensual entertainments of the past calcified in the culture of geisha and in classical Japanese theater, shorn of its wild inventiveness. But the art of Utamaro still retains the old spirit, which now evokes feelings of nostalgia.

The three paintings at the Sackler are unsigned and their provenance is cloudy. They may not be entirely the work of Utamaro. Some experts even claim that one or two of them are not by Utamaro at all. Another mystery lies in their odd sizes, much too big to be hung in a traditional Japanese alcove, or even on the walls of a Japanese house. Yet the subject matter would seem rather unsuitable for display in a temple. Many a fake Utamaro was made for the Western market, hungry for Japanese exotica. But these pictures seem too fine for that.

There are other items in the Sackler show that are well worth studying, especially a number of beautiful prints and illustrated books by Utamaro and others. At the very end of the exhibition there is a large color photograph of a brothel in Tokyo, probably taken at the end of the nineteenth century. We see several rows of what look like very young girls waiting behind wooden bars to be selected by clients passing by. They were virtually enslaved by their employers. Most died of disease in their twenties. It is a reminder that the highest artistic achievements sometimes emerge from the most squalid circumstances.

“Inventing Utamaro: A Japanese Masterpiece Rediscovered” is at the Sackler Gallery through July 9.

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1.

The main Nuremberg war crimes trials began in November 1945 and continued until October 1946. Rebecca West, who reported on the painfully slow proceedings for The New Yorker, described the courtroom as a “citadel of boredom.” But there were moments of drama: Hermann Göring under cross-examination running rings around the chief US prosecutor Robert H. Jackson, for example. Jackson’s opening statement, however, provided the trial’s most famous words:

We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well. We must summon such detachment and intellectual integrity to our task that this Trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity’s aspirations to do justice.

How well humanity lived up to these words, after a good number of bloody conflicts involving some of the same powers that sat in judgment on the Nazi leaders, is the subject of The Memory of Justice, the four-and-a-half-hour documentary that has rarely been seen since 1976 but is considered by its director, Marcel Ophuls, to be his best—even better, perhaps, than his more famous The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), about the Nazi occupation of France, the Vichy government, and the French Resistance.

Near the beginning of The Memory of Justice, the violinist Yehudi Menuhin declares that the barbarism of Nazi Germany can only be seen as a universal moral catastrophe: “I proceed from the assumption that every human being is guilty.” The fact that it happened in Germany, he says, doesn’t mean that it cannot happen elsewhere. This statement comes just after we have seen the Nazi leaders, one after the other, declare their innocence in the Nuremberg courtroom.

We also hear a former French paratrooper recall how the French in Algeria systematically tortured and murdered men, women, and children. There are gruesome images of the Vietnam War. And Telford Taylor, US counsel for the prosecution at Nuremberg, wonders how any of us would cope with the “degeneration of standards under pressures.” Later in the film, Taylor says that his views on Americans and American history have changed more than his views on the Germans whom he once judged.

Such juxtapositions are enough to send some people into a fury. The art critic Harold Rosenberg accused Ophuls in these pages of being “lured…into a near-nihilistic bog in which no one is guilty, because all are guilty and there is no one who is morally qualified to judge.”¹ Ophuls, according to Rosenberg, “trivialized” the Nazi crimes and “diluted” the moral awfulness of the death camps.

This is to misunderstand what Ophuls was up to. The film never suggests that Auschwitz and the My Lai massacre, or French torture prisons in Algiers, are equivalent, let alone that the Vietnam War was a criminal enterprise on the same level as the Holocaust. Nor does Ophuls doubt that the judgment on Göring and his gang at Nuremberg was justified. Ophuls himself was a refugee from the Nazis, forced to leave Germany in 1933, and to flee again when France was invaded in 1940. Instead he tries, dispassionately and sometimes with touches of sardonic humor, to complicate the problem of moral judgment. What makes human beings who are normally unexceptional commit atrocities under abnormal circumstances? What if such crimes are committed by our fellow citizens in the name of our own country? How does our commitment to justice appear today in the light of the judgments at Nuremberg? Will the memory of justice, as Plato assumed, make us strive to do better?

Ophuls does not dilute the monstrosity of Nazi crimes at all. But he refuses to simply regard the perpetrators as monsters. “Belief in the Nazis as monsters,” he once said, “is a form of complacency.” This reminds me of something the controversial German novelist Martin Walser once said about the Auschwitz trials held in Frankfurt in the 1960s. He wasn’t against them. But he argued that the daily horror stories in the popular German press about the grotesque tortures inflicted by Nazi butchers made it easier for ordinary Germans to distance themselves from these crimes and the regime that made them happen. Who could possibly identify with such brutes? If only monsters were responsible for the Holocaust and other mass murders, there would never be any need for the rest of us to look in the mirror.

It is true that Ophuls does not interview former Nazis, such as Albert Speer and Admiral Karl Dönitz, as a prosecutor. His role is not to indict, but to understand better what motivates such men, especially men (and women) who seem otherwise quite civilized. For this, too, Rosenberg condemned him, arguing that he should have balanced the views voiced by these criminals with those of their victims, for otherwise viewers might give the old rogues the benefit of the doubt.

There seems to be little danger of that. Consider Dönitz, for example, who makes the bizarre statement that he could not have been anti-Semitic, since he never discriminated against Jews in the German navy, forgetting for a moment that there were no known Jews in Hitler’s Kriegsmarine. When Ophuls asks him whether he really believes that there was no connection between his ferociously anti-Semitic speeches and the fate of the Jews under the government he served, the admiral’s tight little mouth twitches alarmingly before denying everything in the harsh yelp of a cornered dog. This speaks for itself, and needs no “balancing” by another voice.

Ophuls is a superb interviewer, polite, cool, and relentless. His tone is often skeptical, but never moralistic or aggressive. This allows him to get people to say things they may not have divulged to a more confrontational interlocutor. Albert Speer was responsible for, among other things, the ghastly fate of countless slave laborers pulled from concentration camps to work in German armaments factories. Responding to Ophuls’s quiet probing, this most slippery of customers speaks at length about the moral blindness and criminal opportunism that came from his ruthless ambition. Unlike most Germans of his generation, Speer believed that the Nuremberg trials were justified. But then, he could be said to have got off rather lightly with a prison sentence rather than being hanged.

Where Dönitz is shrill and defensive, Speer is smooth, even charming. This almost certainly saved his life. Telford Taylor believed that Speer should have been hanged, according to the evidence and criteria of Nuremberg. Julius Streicher was executed for being a vile anti-Semitic propagandist, even though he never had anything like the power of Speer. But he was an uncouth, bullet-headed ruffian, described by Rebecca West as “a dirty old man of the sort that gives trouble in parks,” a man one could easily regard as a monster. The judges warmed to Speer as a kind of relief. Compared to Streicher, the vulgar, strutting Göring, the pompous martinet General Alfred Jodl, or the hulking SS chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Speer was a gentleman. What saved him, Taylor recalls in the film, was his superior class. When Ophuls puts this to him, a ghostly smile flits across Speer’s face: “If that’s the explanation…, then I am only too pleased I made such a good impression.” In the event, Speer got twenty years; Dönitz only got ten.

Ophuls said in an interview that it was easy to like Speer. But there is no suggestion that this mitigated his guilt. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who also interviewed Speer at length, called him “the true criminal of Nazi Germany,” precisely because he was clearly not a sadistic brute but a highly educated, well-mannered, “normal” human being who should have known better than to be part of a murderous regime. This is perhaps the main point of Ophuls’s film as well: there was nothing special about the Germans that predisposed them to become killers or, more often, to look away when the killings were done. There is no such thing as a criminal people. A quiet-spoken young architect can end up with more blood on his hands than a Jew-baiting thug. This, I think, is what Yehudi Menuhin meant by his warning that it could happen anywhere.

2.

Far from being a moral nihilist who trivialized the Nazi crimes, Ophuls was so committed to his examination of guilt and justice that The Memory of Justice had a narrow escape from oblivion. The companies that commissioned it, including the BBC, did not like the rough cut. They thought it was far too long. Since the film was to be based on Telford Taylor’s book Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy (1970), they wanted more on the Vietnam War and less on Nuremberg. Rejection only made Ophuls, who never took kindly to being told what to do by the men in suits, stick more stubbornly to his own vision. He was less interested in a specifically American tragedy, or indeed a German tragedy, than in man’s descent into barbarousness, wherever or whenever it happens.

Ophuls was locked out of the cutting room in London. The producers put together a shorter version of the film, with a different spin, which was sold to ZDF television in Germany. Ophuls then traveled all over Europe to save his own version. A German court stopped ZDF from showing the shorter one. The original edit was smuggled to the US, where a private screening reduced Mike Nichols to tears. Hamilton Fish, later a well-known publisher, managed to persuade a group of investors to buy the original movie back and Paramount to distribute it. It was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1976, and then in New York and on college campuses, as well as on television in many countries. But for the cussed perseverance of Ophuls and the help of his American backers, The Memory of Justice would never have been seen. In Fish’s words, “You needed his type of personality to make such a film. He took history on personally.”

After its initial run, however, the movie disappeared. Contracts on archival rights ran out. The film stock was in danger of deteriorating. And so a documentary masterpiece could easily have been lost if Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation had not stepped in with Paramount to put it all back together again, a labor that took ten years and was completed in 2015.

Much has changed, of course, since 1976. Germany is a different country now, geographically, politically, and culturally. When Ophuls talked to Dönitz, the West German establishment was still riddled with former Nazis. Most of the wartime generation masked their dirty secrets with evasions or shabby justifications. The history of the Third Reich, in the words of Eugen Kogon, a Holocaust survivor and the first German historian to write about the camps, was still “the corpse in the cellar.”

Quite ordinary people, like the smiling man encountered by Ophuls in a small town in Schleswig-Holstein, still remembered the Third Reich with great fondness as an orderly time when people knew how to behave and there was “no problem of crime.” Ophuls happened to meet this friendly burgher while he was trying to track down a female doctor who had been convicted at Nuremberg for murdering children in concentration camps by injecting oil into their veins, to name just one of her grisly experiments. After she was released from prison in 1952, she continued for a time to practice as a family doctor. She was, it appears, well respected, even friendly.

When Ophuls finally managed to find her, she very politely declined to be interviewed, since she was in poor health. Another former concentration camp doctor, Gerhard Rose, did agree to talk, however, but only to deny any guilt, claiming that his medical experiments (infecting victims with malaria, for example) served a humanitarian purpose, and that the US Army performed experiments too. Ophuls observes, quite rightly, that American experiments were hardly conducted under the kind of circumstances prevailing in Dachau and Buchenwald. But the hypocrisy of the Western Allies in this matter might have been better illustrated by pointing out that German and Japanese doctors who committed even worse crimes than Dr. Rose were protected by the US government because their knowledge might come in handy during the cold war.²

Perhaps the most disturbing interview in the movie is not with an unrepentant Nazi or a war criminal, but with the gentlemanly and highly esteemed lawyer Otto Kranzbühler. A navy judge during the war, Kranzbühler was defense counsel for Admiral Dönitz at Nuremberg, where he cut a dashing figure in his navy uniform. He later had a successful career as a corporate lawyer, after defending the likes of Alfried Krupp against accusations of having exploited slave labor. Kranzbühler never justified Nazism. But when asked by Ophuls whether he had discussed his own part in the Third Reich with his children, he replied that he had come up with a formula to make them understand: if you were ignorant of what went on, you were a fool; if you knew, but looked the other way, you were a coward; if you knew, and took part, you were a criminal. Were his children reassured? Kranzbühler: “My children didn’t recognize their father in any of the above.”

It was a brilliant evasion. But Kranzbühler was no more evasive than the French prosecutor at Nuremberg, the equally urbane Edgar Faure, who had been a member of the Resistance during the Nazi occupation of France. Ophuls asked him about French war crimes during the Algerian War of Independence, when torture was systematically applied, civilians were massacred, and prisoners were thrown out of helicopters, a practice that later became widespread under South American military regimes. “Well,” said Faure, “events do get out of hand. But you can’t really criticize politicians who have the difficult task of running the government.” Edgar Faure was prime minister of France during part of that war.

The 1970s were a critical time in Germany. There were still people, like the son of the former Waffen SS officer interviewed by Ophuls, who believed that the Nazi death camps were a lie, and it was the Americans who built the gas chambers in concentration camps. But the postwar generation had begun to question their parents amid the student revolts of the 1960s. Just a year after The Memory of Justice was completed, radicalism in Germany turned toxic, when members of the Red Army Faction murdered bankers, kidnapped industrialists, and hijacked planes, all in the name of antifascism, as though to make up for their parents’ complicity with the Nazis.

German families were torn apart by memories of the war. Ophuls includes his own not uncomplicated family in the film. His German wife, Regine, the daughter of a Wehrmacht veteran, speaks openly to American students about her own childhood under the Nazis. One of their teenaged daughters talks about the need to come to terms with the past, even though their mother finds seventeen a little too young to be confronted with images of concentration camps. Then Regine says something personal that cuts to the core of her husband’s life and work. She wishes sometimes that Ophuls would make films that were not about such dark matters. What kind of films? he asks. Lubitsch films, she replies, or My Fair Lady all over again. We then hear Cyd Charisse singing “New Sun in the Sky” from The Band Wagon (1953), while watching Ophuls in a car on his way to find the doctor who murdered children in concentration camps.

This is typical of the Ophuls touch, show tunes evoking happier times overlapping with memories of horror. The motive is not to pile on cheap irony, but to bring in a note of autobiography. His father was Max Ophuls, the great director of Liebelei (1933), La Ronde (1950), and Lola Montès (1955). Max was one of the geniuses of the exile cinema. Memories of a sweeter life in imperial Vienna or nineteenth-century France are darkened in his films by a sense of betrayal and perverse sexuality.

Nostalgia for better days haunted his son, who spent his youth on the run from terror with a father whose genius he always felt he couldn’t live up to. He would have loved to direct movies like La Ronde. Instead he made great documentary films about the past that won’t let him go, about Vichy France, or Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo butcher of Lyon, or Nuremberg. The true horror stories are mixed in all his work, as in a collage, with songs from pre-war Berlin music halls and Hollywood movies.

One of the most unforgettable examples of the Ophuls touch is a scene in a film that has almost never been viewed (another bitter fight with producers). November Days (1991) is about the fall of the Berlin wall. One of the people he interviews is Markus Wolf, the former East German spy chief, whose father, the Communist writer Friedrich Wolf, had known Max Ophuls in pre-war Berlin. While Markus dodges every question about his past with blatant lies, we hear music from one of Max’s movies slowly swell on the soundtrack as Marcel thinks out loud to himself how lucky he was that his father decided to move west instead of east.

3.

In the second half of The Memory of Justice, the focus shifts from east to west, as it were, from Germany to France and the US. Daniel Ellsberg, speaking of Vietnam, says that “this war will cause us to be monstrous.” We hear stories from men who were there of American soldiers murdering civilians in cold blood. We hear a Vietnam veteran talk about being told to shut up by his superiors when he reports a massacre of civilians ordered by his commanding officer. We hear Ellsberg say that no one higher than a lieutenant was ever convicted for the mass killing of Vietnamese civilians by US soldiers in My Lai.

On the French side, stories about summary executions and the use of torture during the Algerian War (1954–1962) are followed by a crucial question put by Ophuls to Edgar Faure, the former Nuremberg prosecutor and later prime minister of France: Did he, Edgar Faure, think the French would have accepted an international commission that would judge, on the basis of Nuremberg, what the French did in Algeria? No, said Faure, after a pensive suck on his pipe, since one cannot compare the invasion of another country to the actions taken by a sovereign state in its own colony.

Sir Hartley Shawcross, the British prosecutor at Nuremberg, speaking to Ophuls in his elegant country house in Sussex, remembers how much his American colleagues had believed in justice and the rule of law. Like other British officials at the time, he took a more cynical view: “All law is created by the victors for the vanquished.” What mattered in his opinion, however, was not who made the laws, but whether the principles were right. About this he had little doubt.

Looking back, Otto Kranzbühler shared Shawcross’s memory of American idealism. But he believed that as a model for the future, Nuremberg had been a failure. The trial, as he saw it, presupposed a united world community in which wars would be a thing of the past. This illusion did not last long.

In fact, the trial was tainted from the beginning, not only because among the men who judged the Nazi leaders were Soviet veterans of Stalin’s bloody show trials, but also because Allied war crimes could not even be mentioned. A former British officer involved in the wartime bomber command had no doubt that the destruction of Dresden was a war crime.

If The Memory of Justice has a weakness, it is that this second half of the film, concentrating on French and American war crimes, is not quite as gripping as the first half about the German legacy of Nuremberg. Perhaps Ophuls’s heart was not in it to the same extent. Or perhaps no matter what one thinks of My Lai or Algiers, they are overshadowed by the sheer scale and savagery of the Nazi crimes.

Then again, pace Rosenberg, Ophuls doesn’t suggest that they are equivalent. What is comparable is the way people look away from, or justify, or deny what is done in their name, or under their watch. The wife of a US marine who died in Vietnam, living in a house stuffed with flags and military memorabilia, simply refuses to entertain the idea that her country could ever do anything wrong. More interesting, and perhaps more damning, is the statement by John Kenneth Galbraith, an impeccably liberal former diplomat and economist. His view of the Vietnam War, he tells Ophuls, had been entirely practical, without any consideration of moral implications.

Vietnam was not the Eastern Front in 1943. My Lai was not Auschwitz. And Galbraith was certainly no Albert Speer. Nevertheless, this technocratic view of violent conflict is precisely what leads many people so far astray under a criminal regime. In the film, Ellsberg describes the tunnel vision of Speer as “controlled stupidity,” the refusal to see the consequences of what one does and stands for.

This brings to mind another brilliant documentary about controlled stupidity, Errol Morris’s The Fog of War (2003), featuring Robert McNamara, the technocrat behind the annihilation of Japanese cities in World War II and the escalation of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. To him, the deliberate killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians was a mathematical problem. Only many years later did he admit that if the US had lost World War II, he could certainly have been indicted as a war criminal.

Even more chilling is another documentary by Morris, which received less attention than The Fog of War. In The Unknown Known (2013), we see Donald Rumsfeld, another gentlemanly technocrat, shrug his shoulders about Vietnam, commenting that “sometimes things just don’t work out.” When, as the result of another war in which he was even more intimately involved, Baghdad was convulsed in anarchic violence, he notoriously remarked that “stuff happens.” This is what Hannah Arendt called a “criminal lack of imagination.”

Perhaps the US in 1945 set its ideals too high. But it is a tragedy that the same country that believed in international law, and did so much to establish the norms of justice, has done so little to live up to them. The US is not even a signatory to the International Criminal Court, a flawed institution like the Nuremberg tribunal, but a necessary step in the right direction. No one can hold the greatest military power on earth accountable for what it does, not for torture rooms in Abu Ghraib, not for locking people up indefinitely without trial, not for murdering civilians with drones.

For Germans living under the Third Reich it was risky to imagine too well what their rulers were doing. To protest was positively dangerous. This is not yet true for those of us living in the age of Trump, when the president of the US openly condones torture and applauds thugs for beating up people at his rallies. We need films like this masterpiece by Ophuls more than ever to remind us of what happens when even the memories of justice fade away.

The post Fools, Cowards, or Criminals? appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

One of Moriyama Daidō’s most famous black-and-white photographs is of a stray dog, a bit wolfish, with matted hair, looking back into the camera watchfully, with a hint of aggression. He took the picture in 1971 in Misawa, home to a large US Air Force base, in the northeast of Japan. Moriyama has described this dog picture as a kind of self-portrait:

I wander around, glare at things, and bark from time to time…. Something there is close to how I look at things and to how I probably appear when I’m wandering. Having become a photographer, I always sensed that I have strayed.

Most people can come up with a decent photograph once in a while, which will look like millions of other photographs. Only the greatest photographers can be easily identified by a unique personal style. Moriyama is one of them. There are some recurring images, in different settings, in color and black-and-white, many of which appear in the three books under review: the grainy close-up of a torn pornographic film poster on a peeling wall; a woman’s legs in mesh tights picked out in a crowded street; a filth-strewn back alley crisscrossed with electric wires; a blown-up newspaper photograph; net curtains in a cheap hotel room; a dilapidated old bar with broken neon lights. Moriyama has an exact eye for the textures of urban life, often decaying, ephemeral, sadly alluring in their temporary shine. In his photographs even inanimate objects, such as pipelines or motorcycle engines, have a vaguely anthropomorphic air about them; they look sexy.

The art of the ephemeral, the melancholy of the fleeting moment, has a long history in Japanese art, but Moriyama has focused his sensibility not on such traditional clichés as the cherry blossom (although in fact he has done that too), but on the commercialized, Americanized, plastic-fantastic, sometimes violent, sometimes erotic surfaces of the modern city. Christopher Isherwood once said about Los Angeles, the city he made his own:

What was there, on this shore, a hundred years ago? Practically nothing. And which, of all these flimsy structures, will be standing a hundred years from now? Probably not a single one. Well, I like that thought. It is bracingly realistic. In such surroundings, it is easier to remember and accept the fact that you won’t be here, either.

The urban sprawl of Southern California, with its billboards, strip malls, and pastiche architecture offering dreams of other places, has been a kind of model for postwar Japanese cities, which often look like much denser versions of Los Angeles. Not only was Tokyo almost entirely destroyed twice in the twentieth century—the first time by a firestorm following the terrible earthquake of 1923 and the second time by B-29 bombers in 1945, when much of the city went up in flames once more—but after the war it was rebuilt very fast in a nationwide scramble for economic revival under American tutelage. To find elements of traditional beauty in modern Tokyo or Osaka, where Moriyama grew up, you have to look very carefully around all the modern mess. The art of Moriyama is to ignore those pretty bits and make the messy look beautiful.

Moriyama is not the only artist to work that vein. Reveling in the dirt of postwar urban life has been the mark of many Japanese filmmakers, dancers, novelists, manga artists, and photographers. Moriyama has collaborated with several of them, such as the playwright, poet, and film director Terayama Shūji and the Butoh dancer Hijikata Tatsumi, both of whom used the Tokyo streets as the backdrop of their performances, which were photographed in the 1960s by the young Moriyama.

A huge influence on Moriyama in those days was the photographer Tōmatsu Shōmei, who was eight years older (Moriyama was born in 1938). Tōmatsu’s attitude toward what the Americans had wrought in Japan, during the military occupation but also during the period that followed, when American-style commercial culture wiped out much of what was left of Japanese tradition, was a combination of rage and fascination. This, too, was rather typical of Japanese artists of his generation.

Tōmatsu’s angry enchantment resulted in an extraordinary series of photographs, all in black-and-white, made in and around US military bases in Okinawa and other parts of Japan. There is hostility in his pictures of GIs snarling at the camera or wrapping their meaty arms around petite Japanese bar hostesses, or of massive B-52 bombers flying low over rice paddies as they come roaring into Misawa or Kadena Air Base. But the Coca-Cola culture and the neon-lit bars and the large foreigners in jeeps with money to burn had a glamorous appeal too. Many Japanese men of Tōmatsu’s age felt humiliated by the overpowering presence of alien victors on their soil and envious at the same time of their free and easy ways, their wealth, their sharp uniforms and cool aviator shades. The occupation also contained the possibilities of greater freedom.

There is less evidence of anger than of fascination in Moriyama’s photographs, some of them taken around the same US bases. Like many other Japanese, he was influenced by Americans whose art was an expression of rebellion against the conventional values of their own culture. The filmmaker Oshima Nagisa, for example, was a fierce critic of US political influence on postwar Japan, yet he was bowled over by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Moriyama was a passionate reader of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. But his real hero was the American photographer William Klein, whose book on New York, published in 1956, was a revelation: the in-your-face close-ups of city crowds, the edginess, the violent allure, the high contrast, tilted angles, and rough, grainy texture.

Moriyama was shocked by Klein’s pictures of street kids pointing a gun at the camera, brightly lit cinema marquees, dead stares of people in the subway, and so on. “Klein’s images,” Moriyama later recalled, “made me realize the limitless freedom, beauty, and tenderness of photographic art.” In 1961, Klein came to photograph Tokyo in the same free, kinetic manner, poking his camera into bathhouses, subways, hair salons, and squalid back streets—all the things Japanese officials desperately keen to show their country off to its best advantage would have liked to hide from foreign eyes, and all the things young photographers like Moriyama found immensely stimulating. One of the most stunning photographs taken by Klein was of Hijikata’s half-naked Butoh dance troupe striking weird poses in a rainy Tokyo alley. On the right you can just see the veteran dancer Ohno Kazuo in drag.

That same year, Moriyama was assisting Hosoe Eikoh on a famous book of photographs of the writer Mishima Yukio, posing naked or dressed in nothing but a loincloth, together with some of Hijikata’s dancers. Not long after that, Moriyama struck out on his own, roaming the streets of Shinjuku, an area of Tokyo that combined the seediness of Times Square in the 1960s and the avant-garde glamor of downtown New York in the 1970s. It was there, around the exit of the teeming railway station, that underground theater troupes performed and anti–Vietnam War demonstrators gathered. Shinjuku had department stores and cinemas, but also warrens of tiny streets lined with bars that once had been brothels.

Prowling the streets of Shinjuku’s Kabukicho, a dense cluster of alleys with bars, strip clubs, massage parlors, comedy clubs, jazz coffee shops, and short-time hotels, Moriyama photographed details that echoed Klein’s work but showed different aesthetic preoccupations. Klein was interested in faces and crowds and the way people move their bodies. Moriyama—and here Warhol was also an influence—was interested in the dreams that cities sell: posters, neon signs, newspapers, clothes, porn magazines, and movies. He has described Shinjuku “as a giant stage backdrop, sometimes as an expanded gekiga [illustrated story], an eternal shantytown…. Mysteriously, there is no sense of time: almost no trace of the passing of time can be found here, the time that every city experiences in its own way.”

What traces history had left in this modern labyrinth were not in buildings but in facsimiles of the past, which Moriyama often photographed: television shows glimpsed in shop windows, advertising using traditional images, close-ups of movie screens. There was only one instance when a historic time was fixed in Shinjuku, according to Moriyama, and that was when “Shinjuku was radiantly radical at the end of the 1960s, a single occasion which caused October 21, 1968 to be inscribed in its annals. All time before and after this date has completely disappeared from its history.”

This is a slight exaggeration. October 21, 1968, is when Shinjuku erupted in student riots on International Anti-War Day. Such violent demonstrations have not been repeated since, but even that date is now largely forgotten. In 1968, Moriyama was part of a group of “engaged” young photographers involved in a short-lived magazine called Provoke, whose aim was to express social and political protest. It included figures like Taki Kōji and Nakahira Takuma, who photographed student demonstrations from the point of view of active supporters. A handsome book, entitled Provoke—which was published to coincide with an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in early 2017—shows the work of all these photographers, including Moriyama. Some of the interviews are as illuminating as the pictures.

Moriyama was not as political as his colleagues. Once, after being dragged along to a student demo, he quickly made his escape. Moriyama remembered: “When we were doing Provoke, after midnight Taki Kōji and Nakahira would gather people, and they would all talk politics. I wasn’t interested in the discussion at all, so I would be in the darkroom or in a bar in Shinjuku, drinking.”

Moriyama did some of his best work at that time. His finest book, in my view, is his first, Nippon Gekijo Shashincho (Japan: A Photo Theater), published in 1968. This beautifully designed volume contains wonderful photographs of actors in a backstreet theater, performing as heroes and villains in versions of old kabuki plays. You can almost smell their greasepaint and the cheap rice crackers noisily consumed by the plebeian audience. He also included pictures of actors in Terayama’s underground theater group, Tenjō Sajiki, looking more like carnival freaks: a fat lady, a midget, mustachioed men in drag. The famous stray dog is in this collection too. There are some pictures of rain-streaked, neon-lit Shinjuku streets at night, and a gritty photo of plump country girls strutting as American-style majorettes.

As was true in many parts of the world, sexual liberation and political protest were part of the same culture in 1960s Japan. Moriyama was drawn to the former. His most memorable work for Provoke was a series of blurred photographs of his sexual encounter with a woman in a hotel room: the naked woman on all fours, the same woman clutching the sheets, hiding her face, or taking a shower. This was the kind of thing that Araki Nobuyoshi, in a far raunchier fashion, would turn into his trademark some years later. Araki’s chronicles of Shinjuku nightlife, and his own sexual predilections, made him a world-famous photographer. But at the time, he was still working for an advertising agency, eyeing the Provoke group with a sense of envy: “I was especially jealous of Mr. Moriyama’s love affairs in the second issue.”

But the eroticism in Moriyama’s photographs is more often voyeuristic than participatory. Apart from women’s legs, glimpsed on subway cars, in crowds, and so on, a recurring obsession is with women’s lips, glossy, pouting, usually shot in extreme close-up, seen on a billboard, on a TV commercial, or in a magazine. The sexualization of life in postwar Japan, in visual media, was partly commercial, a way to draw people to buy products, and partly, in the hands of artists, a form of protest against bourgeois respectability and conventional mores. Some of the radical political activists who had hoped for a revolution in the 1960s turned to making pornographic films, sometimes with a political pretense, when the revolution failed to materialize.

Moriyama was never a pornographer. But he was part of the protest generation. What Japanese artists in the 1960s and 1970s protested against, apart from the Vietnam War, was not so much “US imperialism” or Westernization per se as the primness of official Japanese culture, which aimed to gain the respect of the outside world by mimicking Western high culture in a stultifying way. One of the reasons Butoh dancers, photographers, writers, and filmmakers turned to eroticism was that they meant to strip the prissy Western veneer off contemporary Japanese culture. They tried to find a way back to something essentially Japanese by probing into the earthiest, darkest, most primitive features of life. Words like dorokusai (stinking of earth) or dochaku (native) were commonly used. This often involved reviving some of the least respectable aspects of Japanese culture. Araki, for example, compared himself to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century erotic woodblock print artists, who depicted prostitutes having sex with their clients.

Moriyama also got caught up for a time in this quest for the muddy and the native. In the early 1970s, he decided to abandon Tokyo and started photographing rural scenes, Shinto shrines, and even cherry blossoms, in an attempt to find some semblance of the “authentic” Japanese spirit: “I wanted my heart and soul to ‘return home.’” These were not conventional photos of Japanese tradition. The cherry blossoms are hidden in a gloomy murk; the temples and shrines are made to look almost grotesque; and even in rural Japan, Moriyama’s eye is more easily drawn to tawdry bars and shabby hotel rooms than to the bucolic life. What he caught in these pictures, collected in a book called Tales of Tono (1976),^* were the ghostly images of Japanese tradition, not the glossy idealized culture promoted by Japanese tourist bureaus or depicted by more conventional photographers.

This essay into the native spirit did not last long. Or perhaps a better way of putting this is to say that Moriyama found more of that spirit in the seediness of Tokyo’s backstreets. In one of these streets, somewhere in Shinjuku, he opened a gallery and photography workshop in 1976. As an aspiring photographer myself, I met him there once or twice. I cannot remember much of what he told us in the workshop. Not a great deal, I suspect. He was a shy man with long hair and a slight nervous tic, not given to talk. We did establish a certain rapport over a shared love for the more squalid areas of Osaka. And he spoke a great deal about his enthusiasm for William Klein.

When in 2012 the Tate Gallery in London staged a big exhibition of Klein’s work together with Moriyama’s, the latter took this as a singular honor. I am sure the sentiment was heartfelt. But of the two photographers, it was Moriyama who really stood out in the show. Klein may have been the greater innovator, at least in the 1950s. But he didn’t sustain his high standard. After the series of books he did of great cities—New York, Tokyo, Moscow, Rome—he tried to reinvent himself, rather like Robert Frank, in more experimental work, some of it in cinema. His films were rarely as interesting as those early pictures, though; and where he does go back to his original style—the crowds, the close-ups, and so on—the photos look like tired imitations of what was fresh once.

Moriyama never really departed from his urban, sensual obsessions. Like many Japanese artists, he didn’t try so much to reinvent himself—a Western modernist idea that never quite caught on in Japan—as to refine a style he had come to as a young man. When artists become commercially successful, there is great pressure to repeat their success over and over and produce too many books. This has happened to a number of photographers, by no means all Japanese. Moriyama probably does publish too much. But the quality and interest of his work has rarely wilted.

This may have something to do with the nature of his imagination. The worldwide fame of Araki has led to commissions to photograph outside Japan. Surrounded by an entourage of assistants, he tries to replicate his street photography in such varied locales as Venice, Paris, and New York. It rarely works. In the way that George Grosz needed the stimulation of Weimar Berlin and couldn’t repeat his earlier success in New York, Araki needs to be in his own Tokyo milieu. But Moriyama, like Grosz’s contemporary Max Beckmann, lives more inside his own head. That is why, again like Beckmann, he can work anywhere.

Whether he is in Shinjuku, downtown Los Angeles, Honolulu, or Antwerp, Moriyama’s eye is drawn to the same things: the sinuous tubes, the women’s legs, the glossy lips, the shiny motorbikes, the rain-soaked streets, the advertising. But he finds new and interesting ways to photograph them. Two recent books, Daidō Moriyama: Record and Daido Tokyo, show some of his best contemporary work. It looks a little more polished. But the artificial garishness that marked his earlier black-and-white pictures is just as effectively rendered, if not more so, in color. Moriyama doesn’t need Tokyo to give us his vision of modern urban life, of the marks human beings have made on the world. These are often lurid, ugly, aggressive, and destructive. But they can also contain a perverse kind of beauty. It takes a great artist like Moriyama to make us see it.

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